Underbanked Households

The millions of Americans without bank accounts, By Gillian B. White, October 20, 2016, The Atlantic: “The number of American families without a bank account dropped to about 9 million in 2015, the lowest rate on record since the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation started gathering data in 2009. Still, around 24 million households are considered underbanked, meaning that they have checking accounts but still rely on alternative services—such as pawn shops, check-cashing operations, and payday or auto-title loans—for their credit and cash needs. And that number, a new report finds, hasn’t improved much at all in the past few years, which means that tens of millions of Americans still struggle without access to basic financial services…”