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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

#51

Post by jldugger »

danso wrote: post #48
BryantD wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 piec…

> The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. She does not misrepresent her wealth in her article. At no point does she claim to be scraping by. She states upfront that she has a gainfully-employed husband and a child and they live in Brooklyn, that she has $50k stowed away in an emergency savings account, and that she's been a financial columnist for the NYT and NYMag…

> Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means beyond their job income

Probably the biggest giveaway in the article was the $50,000 inheritance from a grandparent. When my grandparents died, they left the grandchildren a small amount ($500 each, IIRC), and the vast majority to their direct children. This seems standard to me, and if the ratios hold then she presumably stands to inherit far, far more in the future.

I find it hard to fault anyone for assuming people are like themselves in most ways. But maybe don't follow his twitter hot takes. Or twitter in general?

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

#53

Post by renewiltord »

bombcar wrote: post #22
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.

Mine was pretty straightforward. I just walked up to the teller. I might have misremembered the filling in thing but I could have had my $50k in the next few minutes if I hadn’t changed my mind.

I’m in SF so this isn’t a big amount and I’d been to this branch once before. So it wasn’t like I was Al Pacino in Scarface pulling up shaking hands or anything.

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

#54

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Maybe that was it and I misremembered. All I know was that it wasn’t onerous. I walked up to the teller, described things, and asked for the money. Then it struck me I could ask for the many accounts thing. Then it struck me I could just take the $15k and deal with the rest later. It was a while back but there was slightly more friction than when I usually take out smaller amounts like a few thousand.

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

#55

Post by renewiltord »

ty6853 wrote: post #40
brianleb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Haha, a bit snide but not inaccurate. Over the year I had that money in there gaining nothing, I lost thousands of dollars of value. Even just putting it into a HYSA would have been better.

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

#56

Post by nradov »

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.

This is why banks limit funds availability after deposits, especially for paper checks. Most banks will only allow you to immediately withdraw a small amount and hold the rest until the check clears so their exposure is very limited.

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

#57

Post by Kelvin506 »

tptacek wrote: post #52
pavel_lishin wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

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

#58

Post by joe8756438 »

tptacek wrote: post #52
pavel_lishin wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

idk, i think it’s as worth mentioning as the writing style, which a lot of the comments are about. and i think they’re fair — don’t mind the style myself

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

#59

Post by tptacek »

Kelvin506 wrote: post #57
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#60

Post by danso »

jldugger wrote: post #49
danso wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 N…

My read on patrick's article is that he knows that banks operate differently for a select few, and his primary error was assuming the author was not in that elite class. And the Vox article sends a mixed message that encourages the error. For Patrick's part, he does preface this entire article with a "file drawer effect" caveat. It's more of a Twitter corrections column than an HN worthy post: > It no longer looks li…

For sure, good on Patrick for going in-depth on "well my hot take was wrong". But his accusation was more than a twitter hot take; he accused the NYMag writer (and basically, everyone who worked with her) as brazenly committing the most unforgivable crime in journalism. If I were to shoot off my mouth and say "Based on what I know about software engineering, Patio11's [insert one of his ventures here] is almost certainly the Theranos of code" — I would most certainly give a thorough reflection on how my priors and knowledge about software engineering seem to be deeply flawed. Not just "I read 1000 of his blog posts and published articles, and turns out Patrick is a more experienced engineer than I assumed he was. Guess I could've googled more before going off on him."
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