My Grandfather & Predatory Banking
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.
Big banks disgust me honestly. They don’t care about you. You are just profit meat.
The average person is 2 paychecks away from bankruptcy & carries a $5000 credit card balance. We are record high debt loads with record high credit card interest rates while the bankers enjoy huge 7 and 8 figure bonuses for financially enslaving & conditioning the population to accept their unchecked lending & usury.
The financial predation by big banks is systemic. The government is complicit as young people are funnelled into a system of student loans when they are not financially mature enough to realize what they are getting themselves into, and continues until well into elderly years when they are harvested for high interest & fees until their last breath.
Young people are in more debt now than any other generation in history, this lifelong financial burden is causing more millennials to live with their parents, have less kids & own less real estate than any other generation.
Predatory lending by the financial elites is causing a massive economic crisis. Young people are not going to be able to afford to pay their credit card & student loans, and unlike the housing bubble in 2008, these loans are backed by nothing, so they are riskier loans than sub-prime loans.
When the bubble bursts, banks will likely get bailed out again, and the losses will be socialized via increasing the national debt, which is paid off via increased taxation.
This equates to more wealth transfer from lower & middle class to the power class. This isn’t about capitalism v socialism or left v right.
Most people aren’t aware that we don’t live in a world of capitalism, what we currently have is corporatism. Private bankers are in control.
The worst scam of all is the fact that these banks don’t even have the money they are charging you 20% interest on!
Banks are literally able to create money from thin air using “fractional reserve banking.”
When you deposit money to a bank, they are only legally required to keep 8% of the money, the rest they can loan out to someone else.
Money as we know it is actually just pixels, just entries in a bank’s database. The money that we use is debt based.
If you have $100,000 in your bank account, that’s not actually ‘your money’, that’s a liability of $100,000 on the bank’s books.
If everyone tried to withdraw the money in their bank account, the entire financially system as we know it would collapse, because there’s not enough money in existence for even half of the people to withdraw their money.
There’s actually not enough money in existence to pay off all debts.
So banks actually don’t have the money they are loaning you, they are taking zero risk, creating it with a few keystrokes from thin air, then charge you 20% interest on that money.
That’s not capitalism. That’s a corrupt system of control, financial enslavement & usury.
My grandfather was an entrepreneurial milk man until 68.
Unfortunately for him, times changed & he was unable to adapt quickly enough. 5–6 years before retirement, when the local coal miners were laid off, he continued delivering to them, letting them build up larger and larger tabs.
Things got worse when the dairy took all of his grocery store business from him at 65. That was over half of his business gone, he spent the next 3 years losing money.
I was not really aware of this at the time as I was just a high school kid, but my dad caught me up recently.
Poppy was hoping to sell his milk run & his 2 trucks back to the diary for a nice sum. In ~1998 he had to take a TD loan on his house for $26k to keep the business afloat. In ~99 the dairy took all of his corp clients, in ~01 they paid him a measly $10,000 to buy the rest of his customer book & retire with no pension.
He was actually grateful for the $10,000.
My grandfather was a milkman for 45 years and a TD business customer the entire time. I can’t imagine how much money they made off of him.
For the next TWENTY years, my grandparents were living off of just their minuscule old age benefits & my grandfather’s tiny Canada Pension Plan (CPP).
They could only afford to pay the minimum monthly payment on the $26,000 loan that he took out just before retirement.
I calculated that my grandparents paid ~$22,684.80 on their line of credit over those 20 years.
What do you suppose the principal should have been if they paid $22K on a $26k loan? It was STILL $25894.52. I felt furious with the bank.
Predators.
Bitcoin paid off their house loan.
The bank teller was shocked, she started to cry when my nan told her what we were doing. To be clear, I’m not mad at bank employees. The employees of banks don’t have the power to change the system.
I’m moreso fed up with the way big banks create money from thin air, charge high interest & abuse the elderly.
