Access Money Habitudes Online:

Unbanked, Underbanked, Pew Report and JoinBankOn.org

Some interesting news as of late in the unbanked and underbanked world:
Arjan Schutte (@arjanschutte) of Core Innovation Capital and CFSI estimate:

people who don’t rely on banks for their financial needs spend $45 billion in fees and interest, alone.  This is for services such as check cashing, remittances, rent-to-own, title lending, prepaid cards, walk-in bill payments, even bank overdraft.

The post provides a good visual breakdown of those unbanked fees.
Writing in the New York Times, Catherine Rampell (@crampell) reports on the Pew Charitable Trusts’ state-by-state data about unbanked and underbanked versus traditional banking system, with a helpful interactive banking map.
Finally, CFED just launched JoinBankOn.org to allow municipal leaders to access a wide range of tools to help residents gain access to mainstream financial services and enhance families’ economic well being:

The new JoinBankOn.org website offers a data tool that city officials can use to quickly find information on the estimated number and proportion of unbanked and underbanked residents in their city, county, metropolitan area and state. These estimates are based on data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) 2009 National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households (accessible at www.economicinclusion.gov). The data tool also shows that minority, younger and foreign-born residents and those with lower incomes and education levels are at greater risk of being unbanked or underbanked.
In addition, users of the online portal can learn more about programs in their community and tap a wide range of resources for launching a Bank On initiative, including NLC’s Bank On Cities toolkit.