Primary tabs
Post Gazette: New effort aims to teach benefits of bank accounts
When she was growing up, Esther Bush said, the financial advice she got time and time again was to save her money and to buy a house.
Also good advice: open a bank account.
The Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh -- with the support of United Way of Allegheny County, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, financial institutions and local community groups -- recently launched a program to encourage people to sign up for low- or no-cost bank accounts.
The goal of "Bank On Greater Pittsburgh" is to discourage people from using resources such as payday loans and check-cashing businesses, which can often charge heavy fees, and instead use a bank account for paying bills and saving money.
In other words, said Ms. Bush, president and CEO of the Urban League, take the money you would have spent on a payday loan and add it to your grocery bill, or put it toward a car payment. "There is a lot of common sense in this," she said, adding that talking about financial literacy is part of getting people to plan their finances, rather than live paycheck to paycheck. "We want to help them to develop these habits," she said.
In Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, it seems, it's a message that could be particularly useful. Bank On, a program that has been applied in many other U.S. cities, including San Francisco, keeps data on its website about the percentage of households that are "unbanked," meaning without checking or savings accounts, and that are "underbanked," meaning that the household has an account but still uses other services such as rent-to-own agreements and payday lending. According to data on the Bank On website, which cites research statistics from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, 7.7 percent of households nationwide are unbanked and 17.9 percent are underbanked.
Click Here to read the full story.
