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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Why are overdraft fees even allowed?
If the account doesn't have the funds, don't allow the withdrawal.
If someone needs to borrow money, they will use a credit card.
I don't know if all banks allow it but you can turn overdrafts off and get that exact behavior. It's hard to believe but overdraft protection was originally advertised as a feature.
It's nice that you can turn off overdraft protection but some US banks will then charge you a Non Sufficient Funds (NSF) fee when a transaction is refused because it would overdraw your account. So you get fucked either way.
My credit union isn't great, but one time I was $600 short on my tuition payment and they let the transaction through and gave me a call later that day and asked when I expected to pay it back. I told them two weeks and they said "okay". I'm not even sure I was charged anything.
Credit unions be cool like that, at least mine is. Still glad my parents made my account for me, I joke with them that the account is older than me (it actually is)
Good on your parents. Credit Unions can't do everything for you that a bank can, but that's why you just get an account with them for a specific purpose, and use the credit union for everything else.
I was the one to liberate my parents from the fee-laden Bank of America experience.
I've just been glad to dodge most of the shenanigans I read about in this thread and what friends have told me about.
How will the executives and top shareholders afford their private jets if you start taking away their cruelly excessive fees?
For real though, overdraft fees are fucking evil. "Since you are now out of money, you will have to pay back even more of the money you don't have" is just evil.
I believe it's a holdover that originated in the limits of technology in the past. Before the Internet or even dial-up card verification, purchases were made "on faith" if writing a check or paying with a card. The fees were there to prevent banking customers from abusing the pretendness of pretend pretend money. Without the discouragement, a person may go try to buy something at multiple places, and even if a vendor called the bank to verify funds were available, each time the bank would say, "oh yeah, funds are available," until all the paper came back to the bank.
That being said, it's the future, accounts can be verified and mathed upon instantly, and these fees have no place anymore, although I'm sure the banks will try and sell them as, "we're just trying to help out the poor by allowing them needed money when they might not yet have it available, for a small convenient fee."
Especially since the technology of today can mess up in such interesting ways....
My brother had enough to buy a fancy new laptop he had been saving up for, so he did, but the website goofed and accidentally processed the order TWICE... He canceled the second order and they refunded the money, but he still owed a fuckton in overdraft fees, and since the cancellation wasn't instaneous and his bank charges him an extra fee ontop of the overdraft fee for every day his account is in the negatives...
Yeah he was fucked for awhile
Always use Credit for online purchases kids, the charges are far FAR easier to dispute if there's a fuck up and it doesn't overdraft.
what they don’t tell you up front is that it’s up to the user to put a lock on the account so if there is no money, it stops allowing a withdrawal. And then to charge a fee as ‘overdraft protection’. But by default it’s open. It’s very shady Facebook-privacy style way of stacking it against the user just so they can make money on ignorance. Their business is to keep the user ignorant. Very end stage capitalism if scamming is defended as a business model.
Same goes for spending limits and region tracking/locking on checking accounts and associated debit cards.
When moving from BoA to a credit union, I was astonished at how this service was enabled by default. I once purchased a large TV and got a call from the bank's security department confirming the transaction, as I was putting it in my car. I would expect no such service from a major bank.
I've gotten those calls a few times from BoA. But it's always like 2 days after. And it's not necesarily big purchases. I've gotten a TV and been fine. But I got Minecraft when that first came out, and got a call for that. One time I got a call for getting lunch at a fast food place. And these are so far and few in between that they don't really make me feel safe. It's more so just annoying.
I honestly think it has to do with patterns and profiling. The credit transaction processing "data warehouse" middleman has a all the metadata needed to pull this off - so behaviors like fraud can be correlated across many banks and accounts.
In my case, it was the biggest buy I had made on that card to date. Or maybe that store already had fraud problems on record.
That actually would make a lot more sense for Minecraft then. Lol
Don't forget how if you do freeze your account you often cannot block recurring or online purchases
FYI, only in the us.
In Europe a bank account has a 1000$ limit (like a cc) with its appropriate interest (bit less as cc). No lump fee tho
It really depends on what you negotiate with your bank, at least in Germany, though it always takes the same form: Either the withdrawal gets instantly bounced, or you negotiated an automatic credit. On average about 12% interest, definitely limited to 1000 or thereabouts or whatever lower sum you negotiated and the bank allows (depending on your regular income), if you're poor and they're a public or cooperative bank they probably just won't give you one, or cancel it if you're constantly in the negative, or limit it to something like 50 bucks, "buy food for the end of the month" type of territory. (And if you're banking with a private bank that's your own damn bloody fault they make a business out of fucking over their customers).
And while those 12% sound high if used as intended -- need to pay something but your wage check is still five days away or so -- then the interest is negligible. It's not a substitute for an actual credit which are way cheaper and any honourable bank will tell you to refinance if your account is constantly in the red. You after all pay them to manage your money, not steal it.
Oh: When bouncing certain kind of transactions (all modern online ones) the transaction will just fail, you'll see it right there on the POS terminal. With older offline stuff the bank will refuse and bill whoever wanted to withdraw from your account some small amount, you'll then have to deal with that later as they're bound to add it to the bill you have to pay. Long story short if you're short on money don't have your utility bill on automatic withdrawal, transfer the money manually they won't break your knees for delaying it a couple of days.