Third World America - Arianna Huffington [76]
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Knowing that when it comes to getting ahead in America the dice are loaded—and that it’s getting harder and harder to insulate yourself and your family from the consequences of America’s misguided policies—is fostering anger, resentment, cynicism, and despair across the country. But if we’re ever going to change the rigged game, we first have to break that cycle of despair at the personal level. And the greatest antidote to despair is action. Move Your Money is one example.
Another is arming yourself against the predatory behavior of unscrupulous businessmen—especially bankers, mortgage lenders, and credit card companies. This requires becoming smarter and more vigilant about what kinds of companies we give our business to. When it comes to credit cards, pick an issuer—such as a credit union—that’s not busy figuring out ways to get you to pay a 30 percent interest rate or charging every manner of fee and penalty to fatten its bottom line.
Consumer credit unions are not owned by shareholders, who are looking for maximum quarterly profits, but by members, who are looking for stability and service.90 Since their goal is not to maximize short-term profit, credit unions by and large steered clear of risky subprime loans.91 Nearly ninety million Americans belong to credit unions, which usually offer lower fees and higher interest rates on savings.92
Around 70 percent of credit union mortgages are held by the credit unions themselves, as opposed to being sliced up into pieces and sold off on secondary markets for players in the Wall Street casino to bet on.93 (The exceptions are corporate credit unions that began behaving like investment banks and dove into the toxic securities market.)
“A credit union saved me from Bank of America,” wrote Joe McKesson on the Huffington Post.94, 95 “Every day BoA had a way to take some amount of money from me—every day a fee ranging from 25 cents to 35 dollars. Once I went credit union, transparency came back into my life. I woke up with the same amount of money I went to bed with.… The robbery was over. I will never trust a large bank again.”
“All I can say is that nothing beats the personal attention a credit union offers,” wrote Consuelo Flores.96 “It’s the ‘Cheers’ bar where everybody knows your name.”
Deborah Bohn’s nineteen-year-old daughter, who had no credit history, was unable to get a car loan, even when she was offering to put 50 percent down.97 “Our credit union came through for her,” wrote Bohn.
The truth is that millions of people today are unnecessarily losing money every year to banks and other lenders. That is due, in part, to the fact that only 20 percent of households can afford to get quality financial advice.98 But new technology now exists that can change that.
Witness HelloWallet.com, a start-up company that, for a very small fee, acts as an online personal money manager, identifying savings opportunities for its users and alerting them to threats to their financial health before they become economic catastrophes.99 Launched in 2009 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and touted by Bill Clinton, Ernst & Young, and dozens of nonprofits across the country, HelloWallet is giving America something that hasn’t been available before: affordable financial guidance.
The site will automatically find you the best rates on financial products such as mortgages and credit cards and will alert you when your bank tries to increase your rates or charge fees.100 It also makes it easy to create, and keep, a budget: it keeps track of your accounts in a single place, categorizes your spending, and presents you with a breakdown of where you’re spending your money.
Best of all, the site is independent from banks, which means it can help you avoid fees and can give you unbiased guidance about how to make the most out of your money.101 The result is that HelloWallet could, for the first time in a long time, put banks back to work for their customers, saving the