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Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

bitsaboutmoney.com

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Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#21

Post by RandomBacon »

renewiltord wrote: post #17

Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the time in it. In the end I only needed $15k. There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why but it’s not something that requires too much work. In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took Zelle or cash.…

> There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why

I have never had to fill out anything. My credit union didn't even ask why I wanted the cash, they just asked for a second form of identification due to the amount being over 10k.

I know they fill out a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) as required by law, but it's seemless on my end (besides waiting while they fill it out).

I always read about people being hassled by their banks, but never credit unions.

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#22

Post by bombcar »

renewiltord wrote: post #17

Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the time in it. In the end I only needed $15k. There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why but it’s not something that requires too much work. In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took Zelle or cash.…

Banks have always worked with me when I needed large cash withdrawals. They always like if you talk about it beforehand (e.g., don't go in and say you need $30k for a car NOW, but tell them you'd like it next week).

It helps tremendously if the bank manager knows you, or at least recognizes you.

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#23

Post by patio11 »

lxgr wrote: post #4

Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational endeavor: This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor". Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part of me wants my lunch break…

You can put theses in the third paragraph but you can't force everyone to actually read them.

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#24

Post by cbfrench »

foobarian wrote: post #5

> Mandating a cooling-off period causes some scams to effervesce like dew in the morning sun. This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say "evaporate" instead of effervesce?

Probably meant evanesce, which has the same sense as evaporate and could be easily confused with effervesce.

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#25

Post by danso »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #16
danso wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not word-count or details that I'm averse to, but purposeless word count. Patrick spends a huge amount of words alluding to why he thinks The Cut's story is total horseshit — and let's be clear, it was a comically bewildering story by any standards. But all of those details are pointless when the story abruptly concludes with "Well, she said it to the police so I guess it's likely not bullshit". If anything, I w…

The assertion is addressed by: 1. The discovery of new facts that explain why a bank that won't let the average person take out $50k in cash would still plausibly let this person take out $50k in cash 2. The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it, unless they went through a massive effort to fabricate a perfect story. While it is possible to fabricate a story that w…

Here's the graf that most resembles a thesis statement:

> Then, I read the article, with a particular attention to the paragraph quoted above. I felt that several elements of this paragraph were inconsistent with the standard practice of banking.

The quoted paragraph that he refers to:

> When I reached the bank, I told the guard I needed to make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs. Michael [a member of the scamming team] was on speakerphone in my pocket. I asked the teller for $50,000. The woman behind the thick glass window raised her eyebrows, disappeared into a back room, came back with a large metal box of $100 bills, and counted them out with a machine. Then she pushed the stacks of bills through the slot along with a sheet of paper warning me against scams. I thanked her and left.

How does "The Bank of America branch that she named by address (in the police report) has a second-floor teller window" a meaningful verification of the NYMag's problematic paragraph? Unless you think that literally the main problem with the NYMag graf is the first sentence: I told the guard I needed to make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs

> The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it

She knows there's a Bank of America on 1 Flatbush Avenue. You really think that someone who spent months writing and working with an editor to publish a massive fabrication is too lazy to actually visit that actual location, especially when it's a short subway stop from her home?

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#26

Post by MostlyStable »

anigbrowl wrote: post #9

This is so overwritten. tl;dr author was skeptical of a famous story about a writer who got scammed out of $50k cash she withdrew from her bank, because it's actually very hard to get any bank to just hand you $50k of your own money in cash. After months of diligent investigation, author established that writer was well off and was treated differently from regular people because her bank branch is in an upscale neigh…

That's because the point of this article isn't really investigative journalism about this one case and whether or not it actually happened (or at least, it's not only that). It's using that as a jumping off point to inform someone about some of the ways banks operate. If you are not interested in that, then the article isn't for you, but it's not "overwritten".

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#27

Post by brianleb »

renewiltord wrote: post #17

Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the time in it. In the end I only needed $15k. There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why but it’s not something that requires too much work. In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took Zelle or cash.…

>> I had some $115k at the time in it.

I'm sorry, but you are an order of magnitude out of touch with the average American consumer. Average savings balance under the age of 64 is below $73k.[1] Median savings is below $9k. Most people will, outside of their retirement savings, never have access to an account that has over $100,000 in it.

Never.

Not one day in their life.

Median household income is $80k/yr.[2] Personal savings rate is under 5%.[3] As is noted in the title of the article, there are two Americas.

[1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-savings-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28... [3] https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#29

Post by danso »

MostlyStable wrote: post #26
anigbrowl wrote: post #9

This is so overwritten. tl;dr author was skeptical of a famous story about a writer who got scammed out of $50k cash she withdrew from her bank, because it's actually very hard to get any bank to just hand you $50k of your own money in cash. After months of diligent investigation, author established that writer was well off and was treated differently from regular people because her bank branch is in an upscale neigh…

That's because the point of this article isn't really investigative journalism about this one case and whether or not it actually happened (or at least, it's not only that). It's using that as a jumping off point to inform someone about some of the ways banks operate. If you are not interested in that, then the article isn't for you, but it's not "overwritten".

But that's what's infuriating about this article: it doesn't really inform us about the ways bank actually operates, because it seems clear Patrick had made some massively misinformed assumptions about how banks actually operate. He goes into many words about how $50k is such an unwieldly amount for the average bank to have on hand. So is that assumption about the average bank wrong? Or did he wrongly assume that a New York branch of America's 2nd-largest bank operated similarly to any small-town independent bank, and if so, why would he do that?
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