Movie Review: Spent: Looking for Change, A Film by American Express

This is the second of two blog posts by Madeleine Bennett about the unbanked and underbanked.

Thanks to CFSI, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and other organizations, we have access to plenty of statistics about the unbanked and underbanked. Beyond statistics, though, it's a little harder for those of us living "banked" lives to get a sense of the daily struggles facing the unbanked and underbanked.

That's why we're pleased that last year American Express released Spent: Looking for Change, a forty-minute documentary about the unbanked population of America. By showing firsthand the stories of several unbanked households, Spent provides valuable, balanced insight into the lives of these financially challenged and underserved households.

The film opens with a montage of interviews and encounters spliced together, the stories of several households, each struggling to stay afloat in its own way. After the film’s title, the story begins: hard-working people who have never had access to traditional banking services continue not to use them, and families with savings and bank accounts are put in the red by sudden misfortunes such as illness. Instead of traditional banking services, they use check cashing businesses, an available alternative.

But the fees for check-cashing and other alternative financial services add up. "Underserved Americans spend the same percentage of their income on fees and interest as the typical American family spends on groceries," the narrator informs us. On top of the financial loss, one of the subjects compares the work that goes into being unbanked to a part-time job. A mother estimates she uses up a quarter- to a half-tank of gas each payday driving around to pay her bills. A man who uses a prepaid card explains all the fees he is charged to spend his money, sounding frustrated as he checks off a dollar for every purchase.

Next, the film addresses the many pitfalls of credit scoring. One family explains how their lack of credit cards, which helped them avoid debt, made it impossible for them to take out loans. The man with the prepaid card tells how he accrued credit card debt as a teenager struggling to support himself and, with no real options, failed to pay it back. A young artisan who pays her student loan bill every month is still handicapped by her mountain of debt.

As for smaller debt, Spent touches on the topic of the payday loan, a relatively small loan taken out with the expectation that it will be paid back on the consumer's next payday. The title loan is a similar service, but taken out with the consumer's car as collateral and with an amount supposedly proportionate to the car's value. These loans may seem like a logical way to get people through a rough patch, but, like many other Americans, the subjects of Spent testify to the cyclical nature of payday and title loans.

Toward the end of the film, we see households going into crisis. A single mother's car is towed, a young couple is unable to find a house that will accept their credit score, and a family with an autistic child is forced to pawn their beloved possessions. The film's tone changes when it introduces new ideas for financial services, such as new microfinance operations in San Francisco and New York, one for group lending and another that lends to small entrepreneurs. The film concludes with a plea to "Share this film, lend your voice."

Spent does an excellent job of illustrating how hard-working people can slip through the cracks of the American banking system and get stuck in spirals of debt and bad credit. It spends much less time on potential solutions. Unless the viewer visits the movie’s Web site, he or she is left more or less in the dark about what can be done to help.

On the Web site, though, a section entitled "Take Action" offers six options, from the promotion of financial literacy for young people to hosting a screening of Spent and discussing it. These seem to offer a range of solutions to the question that the viewer is left asking at the end of the film: "What can I do about this?"

Perhaps, however, the question should be asked not of typical online movie-watchers, but of financial institutions themselves.