Tonight on GeekNights, we revive our ancient How to Not Suck series with a discussion of how to properly enjoy the beach. With sand, not the movie. In the news, The Fields Medal was stolen, as were the Swedish royal jewels. Kroger might ban Visa, leading us to some thoughts on a cashless society. We will be live at PAX West 2018, including live on the PAX Twitch Stream!
Things of the Day
Episode Links
Back when I was in attending university, the campus banned Visa purchases for tuition fees. I always asked why and never got a straight answer.
After seeing that article, I suppose now it makes sense.
I sucked at the beach. I burnt my feet on hot sand on Tuesday. It’s now Friday and my feet are still tender. Fucking idiot me.
Post office banking?
/15 characters
I recently learned that 97¢ flip-flops from Walmart don’t survive more than one trip to the beach.
That’s obvious, but it’s also a pretty good value. I forget what my sandals cost, but If you divide by 97 cents, I’ve definitely been to the beach way way less times than that. They might last forever, but will I make that many beach trips in my life?
Flip flops are the devil’s shoes, fit only for the torture of the unwary or the briefest of sojourns out to dispose of waste.
A proper sandal with at least two, but ideally three, straps, none of which bisect the toes at any point, is the way to go.
I haven’t really thought about it before but a national credit card that profits the govt with the interest actually seems like a good idea. I’d feel way less shitty about paying whatever interest I do accrue knowing the profits are not going to private banker types.
Also aren’t debit cards pretty easy to get? Including like a PayPal card? so mr homeless guy who finds a sack of money absolutely has easy ways to get that turned into a card payable sum.
Not for a good decade. Same with checking accounts. There aren’t free accounts anymore if you’re poor. The few that exist usually make their profits from fees.
That’s a good point I guess. Never really been cognizent of any account fees but I do recall they exist.
Well, a national free card makes sense. Even if it’s just “go to your local bank of choice and select the federal card account option”
This is why I dumped Bank of America, and Wells Fargo before them. Wells Fargo took over the smaller regional bank, and did some creative accounting to charge me almost $400 in overdrafts. I wrote a check to someone, and they didn’t cash it for like three weeks. When they cashed it there was plenty of money in my account to cover the check. But, the bank inserted the transaction for the check into the transaction history at the date the check was written. Between the time I wrote the check and the day it was cashed I had of course gone about my life buying groceries and gas and everything else, and Wells Fargo retroactively made every single one an overdraft and charged $35 for every transaction.
Even the big evil banks there are usually requirements that you can meet to eliminate all fees. Don’t overdraft. Keep a minimum balance. Get direct deposit, etc. It varies by bank and account.
Yeah but then they pull shit like what happened to me. I switched to Capital One 360 which handles overdrafts in the best way possible. You have a small credit line attached to your account and if you overdraft its like using a credit card, except you never get charged more than a few cents of interest if that. I love it so much after the shenanigans of BofA and Wells Fargo.
Why does it even matter? Never overdraft. If you do overdraft, it’s an emergency, so who cares what happens?
I am broke and in a lot of debt, it happens a lot.
This is hard to avoid if you don’t have much money.
It’s expensive to be poor.
Most of the time people don’t intentionally overdraft. Usually it’s when things go thru at funny times and a deposit and payment are out of sync even if in your real world timeline the deposit came first or something.
You might also have cases where your account is low and some $120 pair of shoes you bought last week finally clears and suddenly you’re -2 dollars and the 5 $3 purchases you made that day on various things suddenly start costing $35 each.
So, sure could do everything via a credit card then paying it down, which is great but some people never actually are told shit like that. So they don’t get in that mindset and Bam… That’s where the banks get you one way or another, or all ways.
I was told credit cards are the folly of rich people and fools and that honest hard working Americans who want to help stop our dependencies on greedy bankers, are the ones who pay cash, rarely borrow (except for important things like cars and houses and school of course 
)
Now somewhere in there I knew there were better ways to handle it, but I certainly never did figure out or develop any sort of good debt management habbits until very recently, at best in my late 20’s. (Let’s qualify good as “better than directly self-sabotaging”) Which means for a long while all my expenses got paid from my actual cash fund directly. Now I haven’t overdrawn in years either, been fine about that; but the ideal ways and the ways I can manage always seem on completely different planes of existence.