> Can you not get a bank account for free in the US?
If you have good credit (which usually requires a well documented reliable income, and no outstanding unmaintained debt from say, a college education or medical condition), if have the $20 or so to spend to keep the account open and in good standing, if you have the time and patience to make sure you never accidentally overdraw or under-use (so as not to get hit with costly fees).
Then sure, a bank account is "free" in the US.
If any of the above doesn't apply to you, then you might have some troubles. And there are a lot of businesses that exist to take advantage of (typically poor) people who have had troubles with real banks.
I've never had a credit check for a checking account. They used to do these a long time back (and it was totally reasonable), but they don't really anymore.
Yes, account maintenance fees are lame, but there are banks that don't have these. They've only recently become widespread for your typical checking account. Banks are getting more aggressive since the myth that using banks somehow benefits the customer is dead (they no longer pay interest, and mostly just laugh when you complain).
For the other things, yes, if you want use your bank account to pay, you have to make sure it has money in it. Is that some sort of problem? Do you expect a bank account to be a license for free money, or this to just automatically handle itself? I don't get it. You say people want bank accounts but can't get them because they don't have the "time and patience" to manage them? Isn't that a good reason not to give them to them?
We do, in fact, have strict banking regulations and a federally-backed insurance program to protect depositors in mismanaged institutions.
I guess the point is that people always paint the U.S. as if it's some wasteland where we kick the teeth of everyone with a net worth < $1M. That's not the case. On further inspection, as in this thread, you'll find that many (though not all) such complaints are someone attempting to craft a sob story out of the fact that we don't live in a rainbow world where bank accounts magically fill themselves up.
There's a separate, parallel system of checking checks. My credit is in very good shape, but there's a company out there that thinks somebody with my name passed a bad check in a state where I don't reside on a bank account that was no longer open when the transaction was made--indeed, the bank itself no longer existed at the time.
I found this out when I went to try to open a joint account with a business partner and got denied. We ended up opening the account at an institution which I already used, instead.
I know that credit unions (and banks, for that matter) in my area don't require a high credit score to open an account - I was able to open two accounts - one in a credit union, another one in a bank - while having no credit score whatsoever after arriving to the country. The bank did actually run a credit check on me, and they told be that it basically came up as "no history", which to them is the same as not passed... but they didn't care, so long as I didn't ask them for a credit card.
The bank referenced above (the one that I was able to open an account for despite not having any credit history) is actually Wells Fargo. Although unlike the credit union, they do have minimum account balance (or account fees).
Anyway, getting back to the original question - if credit unions are indeed much more flexible wrt opening accounts, and not require account fees, why are there so many people without accounts? Is it because some areas simply don't have credit unions?
If you have good credit (which usually requires a well documented reliable income, and no outstanding unmaintained debt from say, a college education or medical condition), if have the $20 or so to spend to keep the account open and in good standing, if you have the time and patience to make sure you never accidentally overdraw or under-use (so as not to get hit with costly fees).
Then sure, a bank account is "free" in the US.
If any of the above doesn't apply to you, then you might have some troubles. And there are a lot of businesses that exist to take advantage of (typically poor) people who have had troubles with real banks.