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CNNMoney.com directs our attention this afternoon to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s first-ever report documenting how many Americans are “unbanked.” Says the study, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington boasts an awfully high percentage of households who don’t use a bank — 10.9 percent, to be precise, which is well over the national average of 7.7 percent. And, according to Page 129 of the study, most of the area’s unbanked are African-American (21.5 percent of those surveyed using this questionnaire said they don’t have bank accounts) or Hispanic (23.7 percent).
And almost a quarter of folks living in the DFW are considered “underbanked,” meaning, yeah, they may have a checking or savings account, but they have “used non-bank money orders, non-bank check-cashing services, payday loans, rent-to-own agreements, or pawn shops at least once or twice a year or refund anticipation loans at least once in the past five years.” And, again, those numbers are highest among African-Americans (33.2) and Hispanics (37.5).
