My Grandfather & Predatory Banking – Brad Mills
I was visiting my grandparents this summer in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
My grandfather, 84, was heading into town to do some banking business. I grabbed my laptop & bummed a ride to the coffee shop. I had to do some banking of my own, via Bitcoin with my Trezor.
My grandfather is still spry in his mid 80s, but I often heard stories of the elderly being taken advantage of, so I asked if I could tag along.
He’s been a customer at the branch since his 20s. They all know him by name. Most of my family members have TD bank accounts thanks to my grandfather. He’s earned them a lot of business during the last 40 years.
On the drive in, listening to a tape he recently recorded of his original guitar songs, I asked my poppy what he had to do at the bank. He said he was making a payment on a loan he had taken out to replace his furnace in the winter.
Since I distrust banks after watching the oscar winning documentary Inside Job (98% on rotten tomatoes) & learned about fractional reserve banking, my scam bells started ringing.
In just the last 10 years, banks in the US have been fined over $250 billion dollars for illegal activity & fraud.
I looked at his paperwork & I was not shocked in the slightest to find that they didn’t actually give him a bank loan, they had signed him up for a high interest credit card.
He was paying over 15% interest.
He didn’t even know he had a credit card & didn’t know where it was.
My grandfather didn’t need a Visa, he has never ‘used’ a Visa card in his life. He doesn’t even use his debit card, he only uses cash.
When we got to the branch, I went with him to the teller and asked her to lower the interest rate. The teller was actually family friend, someone who instructed a dance class I took when I was a child.
She sensed that I was not happy that he had been given a credit card with a high interest rate. She reluctantly told me she was not able to lower the interest rate. I asked why he was given a cash advance on a high interest credit card instead of a low interest line of credit. She didn’t’ know.
This predatory behavior by banks is too common — banks are committing usury.
We asked to switch to a proper low interest loan, so the teller sent us to meet with a loan specialist in the back.
The loan specialist was someone we’d never seen at the branch before. She smiled, she appreciated what we were trying to do, but I knew going in that she was powerless.
Instead of looking at his history at the bank, and all of the business he’s given them plus all of the referrals he’s brought to the bank, the specialist asked about his income.
He’s 84 years old, on a fixed income of old age benefits plus a small pension, which puts him well below the poverty line as most elderly retirees in Canada are.
He was trying to pay the loan off quickly at $500 a month so he wouldn’t lose a lot of his monthly cheque in interest, but the $500 was putting a huge strain on his finances as he was only bringing in maybe $1600–1800 a month.
She quickly said that he was unable to get an unsecured line of credit for $2500.
Unsurprisingly, 50+ years of good credit & business with the bank is worth zero.
She said his rate would still be over 11% if we went through a more detailed loan application putting his house up for collateral, etc.
I fully expected this going in, but I was getting upset.
I told the teller that I would give him a 0% loan from the bank of Bitcoin. We asked her to take the money from my account to clear his CC balance & setup an automatic monthly repayment plan of $200 a month for 12 months from his account to mine.
He was happy with that, it gave him more breathing room for his monthly cheque & dealt with the interest scam of usury by the bank.
I told him he could come to me first if he needed a loan in the future, I asked him not to borrow money from the banks anymore. All this over replacing a furnace in his house.
Published at Sun, 15 Sep 2019 17:22:02 +0000
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By trendingtopics on 2019-03-21 04:38:55