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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

I go quite a bit out of my way to avoid any interactions with banks.

I keep most of my savings in cash and never take out loans. The result: a blank credit report (which HR at most companies seems to like when I'm getting hired) and few late penalties, and never being told I can't have access to my money because of "XYZ." Not to mention, avoiding all the crappy online banking web GUIs.

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Don't you aftraid of losing all of your savings due to a robbery? Also if you would want to purchase a house in the future how would you make a payment? IRS won't like a diplomat full of cash in hundreds of thousands of dollars? They will have questions.

No, glass jars are buried in the back yard. It'd take shovels and hard work to be robbed of that!

I second that. Tried using cash as a down payment on a house did not fly even though I could reconcile the difference in cash with what I kept in the bank with my pay stubs and deposit/withdrawl records. Underwriters want to see that cash sitting in a bank account.

Yeah, if you want to use cash, you basically have to be able to just pay for the house in it's entirety. With downpayments, the underwriters really want to make sure you didn't just take out a loan somewhere to finance that downpayment. Showing up with cash in that instance is basically indicating you don't want them to know where you got the money, which isn't going to fly when a person's job is based around playing it safe.

Even so, most businesses aren't going to want to handle a suitcase full of $200,000+ in cash, unless they are a bank. My lawyer handled all the cash (cashier's check) in my house buying transaction. My lawyer doesn't own an armoured car and doesn't have the ability to handle all that cash.

That is going to bite you bad if you actually need to get a loan, like if you were to buy a house.

I recently got my first credit card, and my loan discrimination gave me some complications. I couldn't get automatically approved for any credit limit since all my loans are paid and closed, giving me an effective credit score of zero (in the loan officer's words).

I stick to credit unions, where you are a shareholder by virtue of being a depositor.

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