Between what the wife and I make combined I’d hardly consider us broke. I still keep an overdraft account for a couple reasons:
- I don’t like keeping a ton of money liquid, especially in my main checking. It’s a terrible investment.
- We both use our debit cards for everything, and I gave up trying to write everything down to keep a running balance a long time ago. I just log in daily and verify the daily purchases look like ours.
I’ve overdrafted twice in the last 10 years doing this, once at HSBC and once at M&T. Both times were a check I forgot my wife had written where I thought I had plenty of money until payday. It cost me less than $10 each time since the overdraft transfer fees are so cheap.
Oh, and when I bought my snowmobile. A great deal came up and instead of moving money out of an investment account I simply transferred the money from my overdraft loan and withdrew it as cash at the bank. 3 days later I got paid and transferred the money back to pay off the loan. Total cost, 3 days interest on the loan since I initiated the transfer negating the automatic overdraft transfer fee.
But yeah, some people are really stupid when it comes to NSF fees. One of the new regs from last year was the cumulative fees for the year (nsf, overdraft and courtesy pay) had to be posted on your monthly bank statements. While writing and testing the code to make this happen I was using some real customer data (we have an app that randomizes name/ssn for testing) and was shocked to see how many NSF fees some people were racking up each month, even more so when I saw the stupid purchases they were making at the same time.