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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

#31

Post by lxgr »

patio11 wrote: post #23
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.

Well, the phrase "I now doubt that account less" didn't evoke "this article outlines the non-refutation of a null hypothesis" for me when I initially read it.

After reading the article, sure, I can see that that's what was implied, but I can only say that it wasn't clear enough for me. I still enjoyed it for what it is, but I think I could have enjoyed it more if primed differently.

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

#32

Post by stetrain »

brianleb wrote: post #27
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] Person…

That's true but I'm not sure how it's relevant.

Most people asking their bank to withdraw $50k+ in cash are by definition going to have above-average assets.

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

#33

Post by ZeWaka »

brianleb wrote: post #27
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] Person…

I don't think the OP ever purported to be doing something the 'average American consumer' would be doing, just relating their experiences to the linked article.

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

#34

Post by jandrese »

lxgr wrote: post #10
rufus_foreman wrote: post #6

It's not just withdrawing money. Walk into a bank and try to deposit a check for $200,000 into your checking account that typically never has more than $2,000 in it and you will likely get some attention.

For very different reasons, though: If the check bounces, the bank potentially takes the loss if the depositor has already withdrawn/spent the funds. In other words, this is a direct credit risk to the bank, not the more indirect reputational or relationship risk of potentially unwittingly or negligently facilitating a scam described in TFA.

No bank is going to let you withdraw funds off of that $200k until it actually clears the ACH, plus a couple of days.

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

#35

Post by danso »

brianleb wrote: post #27
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] Person…

Yes, generally the only people who would be able to withdraw $50k from a savings account are people who are well-off enough to have $50k in a non-retirement savings account. Doesn't it follow, then, that such a person would be seen by the bank as a "well-off customer" and thus enjoy higher withdrawal thresholds?

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

#36

Post by BryantD »

danso wrote: post #18
pchristensen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was that the mention of the 2nd floor teller window was an inconsequential detail that was enough to identify the branch in question, and a gateway to show off his obsessiveness for researching minutiae. But definitely a "genre" article more than his other, more informative ones.

What's not clear to me is: why the confirmation that the NYMag writer's bank has a 2nd floor teller window is enough to mollify Patrick's intense skepticism that her $50k transaction happened like she asserts. If she was already going to torch her own reputation and journalism career to fabricate this scam story, why wouldn't she have the intrepidness to research what various Brooklyn banks look like? Or actually, wh…

It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds together" message.

I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

RandomBacon wrote: post #21
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 hass…

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by lxgr »

emodendroket wrote: post #20
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…

When I heard about this story I had assumed she kept the money in her home. How did she get all the way through withdrawing the money without at any point thinking something about the story didn't add up? Mystifying.

By her account, she did so at least at one point:

> As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out of my trance, and I became furious. No government agency would establish this as “protocol.” It was preposterous.

Unfortunately, the doubts apparently didn't win.

I guess there's a sort of Anna Karenina principle of scams: A successful scam takes a long list of things going exactly right for the scammers, and the unsuccessful ones are much less likely to be widely publicized.

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

#40

Post by ty6853 »

brianleb wrote: post #27
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] Person…

They don't have access to an account with 100k in it because that would generally be pointless for a normal person. A great deal of people have 100k in clear real estate or stocks. Only a moron leaves 100k sitting doing nothing but wait for it to get inflated to oblivion.
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