Hacker Cinema
Spent: Looking for Change
2014 · Film · documentary · 40 min
Directed by Derek Doneen
Spent: Looking for Change is a film about everyday Americans without the financial options most of us take for granted and the movement giving them renewed hope. Turning to pawn chops, check cashing services, and using payday loans to meet basic financial needs can be costly for many of us, with 89 billion dollars a year going to fees and interest for using these types of alternative financial services. It's time for a change. New technology, new ideas and encouraging dialogue around this issue can help make managing money simple and more affordable.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
3 comments on Hacker News
Check out Spent looking for change [0] cool documentary on millions of Americans who can't get a bank account. It's completely different from the article and I understand your criticism, just mentioning it because the documentary addresses the reasons a lot of people actually use services like Ace Cash over banks.
Beyond that, there's generally an information deficiency for poor people. I come from a low-income background but we always did really well because on both sides of my family there's a long tradition of higher education. So forms concerning finances, taxes, housing, education etc, wasn't a challenge.
But I can easily see how not everyone is aware of every single value offer by different banks, especially when so many of them have a history of hidden fees and when you're going to places like ACE Cash for your payday loans anyway.
I mean hell my girlfriend for example, did her Masters', bright girl, upper middle class white family... she's missed out on about $8k the past few years because she wasn't aware of all the tax rules. After I talked her through it she's now netting an additional $1.5k per year. If she'd been poor, parents illiterate, didn't know how to use the internet properly to find information, it'd be even worse. I mean I have educated friends who're in their 50s and they just never use the internet to compare pricing or deals. If two banks offered him an account with minimum balances, and he had one before and got fines because he wasn't able to keep a minimum balance, it's entirely expected that he assumes all banks are like that and goes to ACE Cash.
I fully agree with you, doesn't justify the crappy journalism. That's his job, talk to people and verify their claims and report the story. Just trying to contextualise the experiences of people the journalist probably talked to, trying to explain why they're not using banks.
And I think his point is still valid which is that some of the rioting, e.g. breaking into ACE Cash, might be linked to the predatory practices of ACE Cash that the middle class never has to deal with. Which isn't cashing checks (his mistake), but rather shit like payday loans, where a poor person earns enough, but has crappy cash flow, and has the option of payday loans which have ridiculous 5000% or 7000% interest loans on the people that can least afford them. People who put up their car for collateral lose it. And you see people who borrow $300, and end up paying $400 in interest by the time they pay off the $300 principal, when these are the same people that had to take a loan to pay the rent to avoid becoming homeless and can't afford that. In that context he wants to put the riots, which isn't that crazy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAxL4TB6pmQ
The FDIC estimates that 7.7% of the US adult population is unbanked, and 20% is underbanked [1]. Being un(der)banked is often very costly, it's one of the worst ways where being poor is very expensive [2].
On a global scale the issue is even worse, there are billions of people without access to proper banking services. I can't even begin to imagine how much time/energy/value/productivity is wasted globally due to that. Bitcoin, or another similar solution, may be the key to helping to bring those billions out of their economic exclusion and into a more prosperous reality [3][4].
[1] https://www.economicinclusion.gov/surveys/2013household/ (2013 National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAxL4TB6pmQ (Spent: Looking For Change (Documentary))
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NfNwjJfrOg (What Bitcoin Means For Unbanked Economies)
[4] https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/cell-phone-connected-unbanked-bitcoin-will-bank/ (The Cell Phone Connected the Unbanked, Bitcoin Will Bank Them)
This is a great article. I expect that quite a few people aren't fully aware of the fees they pay in full. If you look at some of the statistics you'll find the average bank account costs about $250 a year, with some customer groups (e.g. those prone to overdraft fees, often optimized for fees by re-ordering of transactions, e.g. see the short documentary Spent: looking for change[0]) you typically see numbers between $500 and $1000.
It seems to be there are tens of millions of people in e.g. the US who aren't fully aware of this, and aren't aware of the alternatives. I mean, a great phone like a Nexus 5 with a modest data plan for two years costs about the same as most people pay for their bank account. Yet that same Nexus 5, combined with an elegant mobile banking app (or at some point apps built on non-proprietary technology like bitcoin) could replace those services entirely.
It seems it's only 2-3 years away before we see massive changes. From the rise of internet-only banks to non-bank digital wallets, the rise of peer-to-peer payments and even non-fiat currencies, it all seems imminent.
The big question for me is, will this be a big regulatory / dependency battle more than anything else? Despite Paypal being digital only, it hasn't really made huge headway outside ecommerce. It seems most forays into digital banking is dependent on the banks themselves. Look at Apple, it created a way to store bank (creditcard) credentials on a piece of hardware. Square created a way to read bank (creditcard) credentials on a piece of hardware. Paypal created a way to send money using bank credentials in software. And most of the bitcoin ecosystem has a foundation in payment processors and exchanges that all require a bank account.
Despite the disruption being clearly on the way, I can't help but notice that it's all very highly integrated with banks, and quite dependent on them, too. There's a lot of power in that to slow down disruption.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAxL4TB6pmQ