So with the new regime executive order declaring it essentially illegal to be unhoused, people at risk might be thinking, “how do they classify me as homeless if I am surfing between friends or family or shelters?”
One of the big answers to this is the practice of debanking. If your financial institutions catch wind that you don’t have a stable address, they will try to close your accounts and send your balance as a cashier’s check to your last legal address. At-risk people understand the many, many scenarios where even just this process could be devastating.
Some unexpected ways you can get de-banked:
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your apartment doesn’t have a legal address
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you lose home owner’s insurance or your coverage changes and your bank decides it doesn’t like that
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your building’s owner defaults
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fire
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flood
You may be at risk and just now realizing it. If you have an MH diagnosis and you don’t have two back-up legal addresses, you are on this Ex O.
Anyway, do not get debanked. Have legal address back-up plans EVEN IF YOU TRY TO FLEE THE COUNTRY because you do not want the regime classifying you as someone they want to put in the camps.
Sorry for another US-centric post.
I left the USA 25 years ago and still keep a bank account at my parents’ address. Not yet debanked.
This is what privilege looks like
And how did the bank decide I was privileged? I don’t keep much money in the account, I’ve overdrawn it many times, I have no record of employment in the US for decades.
Your parents have a home and have maintained the same address for this entire time?
You being lucky doesn’t necessarily imply that other people will be equally lucky, though.
Plus, what we may not have thought about is that the triggers for a financial institution to review your account will happen due to a change in circumstance. Address move, insurance change, employment change.
Since you left 25 years ago, there have presumably been essentially zero changes to your personal status as far as the bank is concerned. They aren’t hearing about it because you don’t live or work in the country anymore.
So your account is just sitting there, quietly unnoticed and unbothered.
To make them want to close it, something would need to happen to make them review it in the first place.