My CFSI colleague, Karen Andres, sent an email this morning about her local Detroit radio show, Drew and Mike in the Morning, on WRIF.  “This is no NPR – beyond bawdy humor, uncomfortably hilarious interviews with innocent people, and hard rock.  Controversial – this ain’t your mama’s radio station,” Karen writes.  Useful validation from real people about stats and perceptions “we” think “they” have:

“Drew and Mike were talking about some article that had been published in either the Free Press or the Detroit News about a possible Bank On Detroit effort. And this got listeners to start calling in to talk about all the reasons why they don’t use banks.  Given that we trade in a lot of summary statistics about these motivations, It was refreshing and beyond interesting to hear real people talking about the real reasons why.  It was invigorating on a Monday morning as I get up to do my very small part in helping create better products and services for them.

“Here are the reasons they cited, as best as I could capture them:

1) “My grandparents taught me this from the Depression.  They could only take out $5 once per week from their bank accounts, so since then we have only relied on cash and money orders.  And I think this is something that gets passed down, especially in multi-family housing units, where everybody is in the same boat – to not trust banks and use cash.”

2) “I have to pay child support and I just don’t want there to be any record of any extra cash in an account somewhere, or it will get taken.”

3) “I know people with government benefits, single mothers on welfare, who don’t want the government to see that they have $500 extra in their account, so they keep getting their benefits.”

4) “I work in the city of Detroit doing tax prep, and I had this elderly woman as a client.  She has never had a bank account – she just uses money orders for everything.  She uses $3 money orders to pay for her $5 prescription drug co-pays.  She tells me that’s just the cost of doing business.  I’m really trying to get her into a bank account.”

5) “For years, I have gotten my check on Friday, and I go to the liquor store to cash my check and pick up some booze and cigarettes.  I also pay off the debt I’ve racked up at the liquor store during the week.  It’s just my lifestyle.”

6) “I know a guy who has been paying his energy bills in cash for a long time.  But he didn’t make a couple of payments, and they didn’t have in their system that he had a history of paying his bills, so they just shut off his energy.”

(Thanks Karen!)