This, strictly speaking, isn't how it happens, allowing for things like deposit availability (when a check clears), but understand that if you deposit cash at 4PM Monday that covers a series of transactions from the weekend that would make you overdrawn does not guarantee you won't get hit with a bundle of overdraft fees. Rationally speaking, it should (after all, if the bank is zeroing out all your daily transactions at once, no money has been lost if you end up with a positive balance), but, you know, banks. If you imagine that an overdrawn amount as a bell that rings every time you are mathematically in the red, you can see how the bell rings five times before you cash deposit hits, and voila, 5 overdraft fees, even though by 7PM Monday your account is adequately funded.

Until federal bank regs are overhauled so that settlement occurs immediately (something that is, generally speaking, technically viable), you can fume at banks all you want, but you can't really stop them, so keep the above in mind, since it mirrors the way accounts were processed before ATMs (this is the 'batch processing' that Gladwell was referring to in his latest opus of idiocy) and various settlement advances happened. It should generally protect you from fee problems, but also will constrain your spending. Just because online banking looks immediate and feels like it is the last word, it may well not be the case.

Generally, avoid combo ATM/Debit cards, and use a monthly intermediary like AMEX to fund card purchasing, or online payments (like PayPal), unless you check on or manage your frequently. AMEX requires more discipline, but the liability issues about a Debit card are not worth the headache, and AMEX has excellent fraud management. When you use AMEX, you are basically withholding final settlement of your liability, which is not a bad personal policy, provided you manage your cash. It will be the only leverage you get, so take what you can, since everyone else is. Your employer makes you wait two weeks for pay, the government holds your estimated takes up to a year before issuing the refund you are due, so why shouldn't you delay final settlement as long as possible?

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So they fudged the date on my cheque, pulled out and put back in a transaction, and rearranged the transactions from highest to lowest to maximise their overdrafts.

And then they tell me to use Online Banking to keep track of my fucking account!

FUCK BofA. No sane human being can keep up with these constant mindfucks. Instead of having almost $80 in my account I am now $98 overdrawn.

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But lately I have been careful, careful, careful and have been transferring money when I need to, before I need to and keep a balance in my savings and checking accounts.

So they closed my overdraft line of credit. For "inactivity".

I used to be able to use my ATM card like a credit card and not have to deal with putting stuff on a credit card, but now it is no longer a credit card at all. So I have no cushion whatsoever.

To make this feel even more disempowering, this was the last credit that I had in my name only.

And the saddest thing? We stay with BofA because we have not found another bank that isn't worse.

You can take advantage of their low balance emails service and I highly recommend it. It is free.

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Oh, B of A horror story:
I had fraudulent activity on my account and filed a claim. They said they'd send me an affadavit to sign, I never received it so I called them to ask them to have another one sent. In the meantime, they refunded my account the money that was missing. I sent back the affadavit and assumed all was fine. Fast forward a month later and I go to my checking account one morning and find that I am overdrawn by a few hundred dollars. This was on a day that I had scheduled my bills to be paid and I watched in horror as my account continued to be overdrawn while they tried to sort out what happened to my affadavit. Finally, they found the "missing" paperwork and I demanded they reverse some of the overdraft fees and they said they could only reverse 1 every 6 months (there were 4) and they wouldn't return the money that I'd filed a claim over because they didn't process the paperwork until 30 days after I filed the initial claim. I hate them. So much.

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I disagree. Sue Decker, as bad as she was, only continued with the process of bureaucratization that has been a constant at Yahoo, and that is a common issue in all big companies hiring people coming from the same MBA schools (schools of thought, I would add).

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