5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor

Even though it’s from cracked.com, definitely NOT a humor article.

You Get Charged For Using Your Own Money

The bank can hit you with a $35 fine for every charge that comes in while you are in minus territory. The bank will not tell you they charged you this money. You will have no idea anything is wrong.

It’s a silent chain reaction in which every charge that comes through during those few days before payday draws the $35 fee. The $8 you spent at the gas station for cigarettes, the $24.99 that automatically comes out for your Internet access … for each, the bank silently zaps out the charge and $35 on top of it, until your next paycheck is gone. Five seconds of oversight gave the bank the right to take away a week’s worth of your labor.

Some of you are saying, “Fine, just tell the bank to go fuck itself. Walk out the door and just do everything by cash or money order.” Ah, but now when you get paid, you have to go somewhere to cash your paycheck — and businesses charge up to $8 to do it. If you’re working in the service industry, congratulations — an hour of your labor just vanished … just so you could use your own money. Some describe this as a “poverty tax.”

Others refer to it as a “Because fuck you, that’s why” fee.

And more:

Walmart is now advertising a new “low” rate for cashing checks of only $3.

Any such rate seems like it’s too much, since the check is your money, and paying $3 for your own money is a rip-off. But, as Walmart points out, $3 is a lot less than many of their competitors charge for this same dubious service. Those check-cashing competitors, Walmart says, can charge as much as $8 per check.

Walmart’s TV ad for this check-cashing service actually underestimates the savings this could mean for their marks customers. A fresh-faced young couple tells us how happy they are to be using Walmart’s $3-a-check service instead of the $8 alternative. The husband holds up a calculator and tells us this saves them about $200 a year. With both of them earning a paycheck every two weeks, that’s actually more like $250 a year — and that $50 difference would be substantial for the annual budget of a working-class couple outside the fringes of the banking system.

The same quick and dirty arithmetic also lets us easily calculate the annual cost of check-cashing for this couple even at Walmart prices: $150 a year.
That $150 is a poverty tax — a fee paid by the poor because they are poor.