Mike Hudack

Hi. I'm Mike Hudack and this is my Tumblr. I'm a high school dropout, the CEO of blip.tv and a former warblogger. Also check out the blip.tv blog.
Why so bitter? Switch banks if you don’t like it.

Mike Hudack on my previous post on over draft fees.

I work in legal services. I have clients who are literally charged thousands of dollars a year in overdraft fees for the twin crimes of poverty and financial illiteracy. Their homes are now in foreclosure. They may lose their house because the bank deducted money from their bank account in exchange for … nothing.

Financial savvy is great—if you’ve got it. And if don’t but can learn it, learn it. But many people don’t have those options. Our financial system is like the Temple of Doom. It’s full of senseless and unnecessary traps dedicated to the false god Avarice. We’re not all Indiana Jones.

We shouldn’t have to be. Perhaps the best of us can avoid the collapsing floor or the rolling boulders or the pits full of adders. But why not set rules for our financial system that allow people of average (or even below average) financial sophistication to use it people to ouldn’t it be better to have a financial system that people can just use? We have traffic laws—and those work out pretty well. Maybe some drivers have sufficiently mad skills to avoid accidents even without stop signs or a designated side of the road to drive on. But a system that works for more people is a better system. And we could easily make our financial system work better for everybody.

Switching banks won’t solve that problem. Legislation has solved part of the problem. We should solve the rest of it the same way.

(via squashed, marco)

There’s an easy way to solve this problem without unintended consequences. Education. Don’t try to regulate the system to operate the way you think it should work. Let competition drive some banks to behave better, and educate people about how they can better manage their finances by moving to those banks.

Notes about this post from the Tumblr community:

  1. vampirecupcakes reblogged this from robot-heart-politics
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  3. robbiemitchell said: They’re speaking to all those people (myself included) who have, at some low point, accidentally purchased a coffee with a debit card with insufficient funds, leading to a $25 overdraft fee.
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  13. combray reblogged this from marco and added:
    I was complaining about this ad this morning when Robin & I walked by it on the way
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    I get a kick out of arguments wherein lying, cheating, and stealing [by people who are sufficiently clever and white...
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