In the USA, most checking accounts are "free" as in "Free if you jump through hoops" - I mean, often they are hoops that are trivial for those of us who have

In the USA, most checking accounts are "free" as in "Free if you jump through hoops" - I mean, often they are hoops that are trivial for those of us who have a good job, like "free if you have direct deposit" I mean, remember that if banks are making money off investing your deposit, they don't have much interest in maintaining accounts for people who don't have much money to invest. I know at times when I didn't have direct deposit (corp to corp contractor, before I figured out how to setup all the requisite infrastructure on my end) I usually ended up paying like $10 a month or more for my personal checking. Every time I went in the bank, the teller would have some different wacky scheme for getting me free checking, usually involving transferring money between my accounts every month... but it was a lot more work keeping up with how to get the free checking (the requirements for people without direct deposit kept changing) and $10/month was cheaper than the time to figure it out. But, I mean my point is that I think checking is not free if you don't have a decent job. add to that the money they charge you if you aren't organized enough to make sure there is enough money in the account to cover the fee, and yeah, I can totally see how poor people wouldn't have a checking account.