I had $50 in venmo, which I used to purchase groceries, because my bank account is currently negative.
Instead of using the $50 in my bank account, instead, a week later the $50 came out of my bank account, not touching the Venmo balance at all.
So now I have an overdraft fee, effectively meaning I paid 1.5 times for those groceries.
I don’t have “overdraft protection,” I’ve told my bank I don’t want overdrafts to go through, but fuck me for being poor I guess.
Typically overdraft protection means it takes money from your savings, or other linked account, and transfers to your checking. When I had Bank of America they charged me $5 every time this happened.
I have an account at a credit union now, no overdraft charges, no cost when it pulls money from my savings account.
Credit unions are the way to go. Seriously if your reading this and have an account with a mega corp, go to a credit union. Start with a checking account, in time you can migrate all your other stuff over. Better deals on loans, and they’re not predators. And you have a better chance of not enriching the billionaire class while you’re at it.
Small banks are good too. I used to use a fantastic local one called First Republic where every customer had a banker they could call or email if needed. First Republic were acquired by Chase, who wanted some huge amount of money in the account (something like $200k) to get a similar level of service through Chase Private Client. I closed the account.
Why would you want it to automatically grab money from your savings? Wouldn’t you just want to transfer that yourself?
I feel like it’s an extra guardrail that if somebody tries to pull 3000$ from your bank account and you only have 500 there that it can only pull the 500 and not the additional 2500 from your savings account?
Because it keeps them rent payment from bouncing.
Some people aren’t good with money management and may forget to transfer money across, especially for scheduled things (bill payments, rent, etc)
Wells Fargo used to do that to me.
Yeah because that robot needed to be reimbursed for their time lost moving MY money from one account to another.
I had money transferred into savings because that was the requirement to have a “free” checking account despite me not wanting to use their bullshit savings account. It finally led to me canceling it because “you transfer too often from your savings account” and they cited this stupid law that says I can only transfer from savings so many times before triggering yet another fee that goes to the bank.
Fuck all these big banks and the banking system that enables this shitty behavior.