this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
744 points (98.6% liked)

Personal Finance

3806 readers
1 users here now

Learn about budgeting, saving, getting out of debt, credit, investing, and retirement planning. Join our community, read the PF Wiki, and get on top of your finances!

Note: This community is not region centric, so if you are posting anything specific to a certain region, kindly specify that in the title (something like [USA], [EU], [AUS] etc.)

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It requires that you provide a lot of documentation to get something that qualifies as a RealID. Multiple documents showing your full name, birth date, SSN, and proof of address. And if you can't provide that paperwork, no ID for you, get fucked. Maybe that doesn't seem like much, you just need the RealID to fly on planes, right? But if you can't get an ID you can't get hired. You can't drive. You can't rent a place. You can't vote in a lot of places.

And then you get the ugly Catch 22 where you can't get a RealID because you're homeless and jobless, and you can't get a home or job because you don't have any ID.

My dad helped an old friend he knew who he found out hard been homeless for a while. And realized how you can be unpersoned. The old guy had no living family, no supporting documents to prove who he was and as such couldn't get an ID. Which meant he couldn't get a bank account, or a job that wasn't cash under the table.