I worked for Wells Fargo for a little while. While working there they were a sales driven bank. All they cared about were ‘solutions’. Which basically means getting people to open new accounts, start a new line of credit that kind of bullshit. Now for most people, a checking, savings and maybe a credit card is all you want or need.
What they trained us to do was to convince poor people to open a separate checking and savings account. As many ass possible. And they would be ‘free’ so long as you met certain criteria. Those being things like a certain amount of transactions, minimum balances or transfers. Easy stuff.
But the criteria are set to change every 12 months or so depending on the accounts. Now Wells Fargo would open hundreds of thousands of these accounts a year. So every 12 months hundreds of thousands of people would just start having 8 or 10 or 12 dollar fees coming out of their accounts with no explanation. Now, some people are able to come in and meet with a banker after waiting in a lobby for a few hours. But not everyone. And absolutely NO ONE is informed that their account will not be free forever.
So basically, Wells Fargo is lying to their customers and intentionally stealing their money.
The worst part is that generally the people with these kinds of fees being assessed are the people where if a random 12 dollar fee comes out at the wrong time, you end up in overdraft land. Once you’re there, you basically stay there. They charge 34 bucks per charge over your balance. So if you have 20 bucks, spend 5 on gas, 10 on lunch and dinner and then buy milk on the way home and had no idea a random 12 dollar charge was coming out you’re out 100 bucks.
And it’s all 100 % legal.
Fuck Wells Fargo.
If it wasnt for the fact that they have our car loan, we’d have nothing to do with them
lower-income people tend to be “hoarders” and richer people are able to do more “minimalist” living spaces. if u don’t have much, you will hold onto any little thing that comes across your way. you got a new tv, but you still keep the old tv because you know things can break. you keep extra boxes of macaroni and cheese lying around because there will be a week when you don’t have money for groceries. you hold onto your stacks of books and clothes for dear life. those are your assets. physical evidence of where your money’s gone. it’s hard to get rid of it. the bare wall is terrifying when you don’t have much.
Fuck. This makes so much sense and explains so much about me. I must have inherited this from my mum.
so I’d normally put this in the tags but it’s kind of a lot so just reblog this from OP to skip my commentary. But I dogsit for a family who is clearly LOADED. Their house is immaculate. High, vaulted ceilings, wood flooring, two chandeliers in one room. These things are fancy, right ?? I really don’t know, anything that isn’t tile or 30 year old carpet seems fancy to me. It also so… bare. Everything is organized perfectly, they have no excess. Their decor is extravagant and yet minimal – it is carefully and precisely executed. Nothing that doesn’t match the aesthetic sits in their living room. I tried to replicate some of it, but it’s just not possible. I have every book I’ve ever owned, my mom keeps papers upon papers, VHSs in a dresser, how do you just get rid of these things when you know you may not have the opportunity to buy them again? How must it feel to live in such orderly quarters where everything is replaceable?
This really locked into my brain when I was reading one of the declutter your space things and it suggested getting rid of duplicate highlighters and pens. /Pens/. It suggested that you needed one or two working pens, so if you had extra you should get rid of them. That was when I realized minimalist living was /innately/ tied to having spare money, because the idea was, of course you just went out and bought the single replacement thing whenever the first thing broke. You obv. Had the time and money to only ever hold what you needed that moment, because you could always buy more later.
there’s a nice article titled “minimalism is just another boring product wealthy people can buy” by Chelsea Fagan which i feel addressed lots of my problems with minimalism, you can read it [here]
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 