Is it possible to live in the US without a bank account?

Factual Questions
81

There are a bewildering variety, like a couple dozen, of different kinds of “trust”. Which are creatures mostly of state law with some interstate and federal standardization. Details matter in the law.

Under US law one can absolutely create a trust where you are in de facto control of it, but legally it isn’t you or yours. Which might be sufficient fig leaf to satisfy the deliberately soft reporting requirements of the Congressional Disclosure rules.

What matters for the question of whether Johnson is lying on his forms is the details of the reporting requirements and the details of how all assets even related even vaguely to him are arranged. None of us have answers to either side of that equation handy.

If he does have all that stuff in a trust he still controls, he’s certainly circumventing what we wish the spirit of the law / reg / rule was. But absent knowing, we’re all guessing.

82

My father was in a pooled special needs trust - his pension and social security checks went into it each month. He could not deposit any additional funds into it. It paid for his needs - it would have paid for rent if he had any to pay , and it did pay for food, clothing , utilities and so on. He might have been able to get a monthly stipend but he didn’t need one. The trust would even pay bills that exceeded his deposits in a given month. But it was absolutely not his money any longer - if there was $2000 in the trust when he died, it would either be recouped by Medicaid or stay in the trust and fund the other beneficiaries. The entire purpose of this kind of trust is so that the disabled beneficiary will remain eligible for income and asset tested benefits.

83

Is Social Security and Medicare withholding mandatory, as well as other taxes?

84

I could DEFINITELY see him not being a Suzie Orman fan, if only because she’s an out lesbian.

85

Why is it embarrassing? They do that with any bill of $20 or over, at least in the U.S.

p.s. I thought that got the ball rolling for George Floyd’s very public demise.

p.p.s. I overheard a woman who was in charge of a large rummage sale in my city talking to a friend about it, and she hadn’t known that any cash deposit exceeding $10,000 calls for a meeting with a bank officer. That’s why she made several deposits a day during the sale (and also to reduce losses were they ever to be robbed).

86

And that latter decison was a very severe federal crime that was completely unnecessary for her to commit.

Do NOT ever do that. Cash over $10K is fill out a one page form with a banker. Cash over $10K split into small deposits is maybe go to prison.

87

You’re being sarcastic, I’m assuming?

88

Not in the least. Google “Structuring Money Laundering”

There are very severe penalties for avoiding the reporting requirement. Basically innocent people are assumed to have no reason to evade reporting requirements. Criminals do.

That said you articulated a possibly credible reason for making multiple trips. To reduce the risk of a total loss.

89

My late first wife was a banking attorney. This is probably the easiest way for a normal average citizen to find themselves facing a Federal Judge. There is no room for the bank to do anything but call the Feds if they figure out what your friend did. The good news is that banks sort that stuff out on a nearly daily basis. So if whatever was done was more than a couple months ago, she got away with it. That time.

But tell them to not ever do that again.

90

It’s a little strange - it’s perfectly legal to make multiple deposits as long as you are not doing so to avoid the reporting requirements. I think that’s part of the reason why I 'm hearing about home invasions where the robbers get tens of thousands in cash. The victims almost have to be people in cash businesses who don’t want to fill out the paperwork but know they can’t deposit $8 or $9K a day without raising suspicion.

I knew about it , (probably from here) and told my husband to just fill out the damn form, which only takes a few minutes when he was talking about splitting a deposit of $15K in cash. You don’t save any time by not filling out the form ( now you are making another trip to the bank) and if memory serves, the form doesn’t even ask where the money comes from beyond which entity the deposit is being made for ( if I make the deposit for my job, there’s a space for my info and another for my employer’s info). But you can end up in prison for not filling it out.

91

Yep. there are few special exemptions.

This is totally correct.

Do not be scared of a CTR, It is no big deal… well, unless you are a drug dealer.

They dont call, in fact that is a non-no. They file a SAR.

But if you deposit say $9999 instead of 10001.00, because you hate round numbers, they aint gonna buy that.

Now I was consulting for a Big bank, and they were filing too many SARS, and I found out that they were charging for cash deposits of $10000+, but not for $9999, so one of their business did it like that to avoid the fees (legit, but looks bad, so they filed the SAR), so i pointed that out , and they quickly changed how they charge for cash deposits.

92

I am a normally functioning adult human who lived for many years without a bank account.

I’d be happy to field any questions.

It’s not easy–being poor is very much not easy–it’s very much more expensive than having money. I can elaborate on that in a minute.

My situation was unique: I worked freelance so I had no main “paycheck” coming regularly.

I DID often (even mostly) get paid via check, and I had a nice little system–I’d simply go to the issuing bank and cash the check there for free (as is the case with all local financial institutions).

For non-local Banks, I found a kind of bodega type convenience store that offered check cashing right by my apartment. Not only were they providing a niche service, but they intended to cater to a very wide swath of people who need non-institutionalized check cashing at an affordable rate: Immigrants.

That place was kind of a god blessing–they gave you a customer PIN to identify yourself for repeat check cashing, which lowered the cost once you were kind of “vetted” as not being up to bad things. It was very nice.

I only once recall using a check-cashing chain type place…outrageous rates.

To pay bills and other necessary transactions outside of cash, I kept a series of reloadable debit cards, or paid via money orders.

“Being Poor Costs More”–every one of these little transactions cost me more money.
If you don’t have enough money in the bank to cover something coming out, you get hit with a finance charge. So not having enough money costs you more money. Miss your phone payment and it gets cut off–or can’t pay it until you get your next pop of money–pay a re-activation fee.

Fees for everything, fees on top of fees! It’s a boot on your neck.

I’m REALLY glad to be past those days, but I really did make not having a bank account work for a long, long time–probably close to a decade, even.

On another hand, Doctress Colossus banks through USAA, which has no branches in our state, so managing cash has become a problem since we cannot easily make deposits.

93

Which suggests you two must receive a non-trivial amount of cash in payment for something.

Assuming you (not her) have a local full-service bank account, it isn’t hard to set up direct ACH transfers. Such that you can deposit her cash in your account and as soon as those funds are available dispatch them to her account at no cost and only a day’s delay. Not ideal, but doable enough.


My late first wife and I also banked solely out of state for roughly 20 years. But we so rarely received cash in any quantity that it was easy enough to spend what little we did get in a reasonable timeframe. And of course withdrawing cash from an out of state bank is easy once you know which ATM network they use and where those can be found where you live.

We eventually moved our primary banking to a major national bank with in-state offices. Still don’t deposit cash though.

94

All she needed to do, and in fact was what she did when she was called into the manager’s office, was explain the situation. They haven’t had the big sale over the past couple of years (and COVID was not the main reason why) but it had never been a problem since.

95

I really had to dive for this thread, and remembered the incident but didn’t realize it was this long ago. Anyway, I was at the post office, and an elderly man came in to buy money orders and started pulling large bundles of cash out of his overalls, and they had to call the postmaster. I didn’t stick around to find out what was up.

96

I see my snide clever asides are not lost on some people.

If you make several deposits over the course of the day because “I don’t want thousands of dollars sitting in a cardboard box by the door of a church hall” then you are perfectly OK. If you tell the bank manager “I’m doing this to avoid the $10,000 limit” then you are structuring. The feds promised to stop freezing and seizing bank accounts if the person was simply running a legitimate cash business and didn’t realize structuring was a crime, but… do you expect them to stick to that?

The article talking about that described a couple that ran a very popular seasonal restaurant, and by the time they got their bank accounts unfrozen, and money returned, many months later. They’d already gone into bankruptcy being unable to pay suppliers, wages, rent, utilities etc. on a >$10K/day business. The sad part - they did it because the teller told them “you should avoid depositing more that $10,000 at one time because we have to report it.” (Lazy teller?) That was not an acceptable excuse, it only proved the crime. Fortunately, the feds decided not to charge them after all the publicity, that could have at the very least resulted in a serious fine.

97

I should add, but if the feds don’t believe that reason then you are screwed anyway.

98

And meanwhile, the rich person wearing that boot had dry feet.

99

The Speaker is a federal employee. All federal employees only get paid via direct deposit ( 31 U.S. Code § 3332).

100

If you’re depositing hundreds, they at least think you’re a cocaine dealer and not one of those low class heroin dealers.