It’s expensive to be poor, September 5, 2015, The Economist: “When Ken Martin, a hat-seller, pays his monthly child-support bill, he uses a money order rather than writing a cheque. Money orders, he says, carry no risk of going overdrawn, which would incur a $40 bank fee. They cost $7 at the bank. At the post office they are only $1.25 but getting there is inconvenient. Despite this, while he was recently homeless, Mr Martin preferred to sleep on the streets with hundreds of dollars in cash—the result of missing closing time at the post office—rather than risk incurring the overdraft fee. The hefty charge, he says, would kill me.’ Life is expensive for America’s poor, with financial services the primary culprit, something that also afflicts migrants sending money home…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty