I’m just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I’ve recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.
Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?
A $10k emergency fund? Even banks don’t carry enough cash these days for a working class person to be able to rob a bank to have that kind of money.
The point of an emergency fund is it will get you through whatever unexpectable large expense without taking on debt. Car needed a repair and you had a health procedure plus your water heater went out all in the same year? 10k might not cover all of that but it will give you the options to manage those emergencies as they come up
Edit to add: banks also may carry more cash on hand than you might think. I worked IT at a bank fairly recently and I could see in the teller software as I remoted in to assist them that they’d have around 3-500 on their individual tills, and when I’d stop by branches to help out with things, sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the stacks of cash kept in the on-site vault, or one time saw the teller pull out a $10k bundle of 100s to fulfill a customer request of a couple hundred bucks while I was assisting with something else. I don’t know exactly what goes into how a bank determines how much cash to keep at a given branch, but it’s certainly more than the couple thousand or so that people say branches only keep on hand