Bank accounts, insufficient funds, and bank charges!@#$%^&*

Aw, that sucks! If I were you I'd go talk to the bank manager, and make a little bit of a stink about how you had enough money.. but of course the deposit went through last so it overdrew you. They might be nice and reverse the NSF fees for you. Most banks can. I know my bank (the one I use, not the one I work for)seems to process things between 11am and noon everyday. Anytime a check clears my account, that's the time it's going to clear. Direct deposits clear automatically though as soon as they're posted. My husband's DD clears into our account at 5am Friday mornings, that's what time his bank releases the funds. If the funds into your account was a check that had a hold on it, that would obviously delay the availability of the funds and cause and overdraw. I think the release of those funds is all electronic, actual people don't handle that sort of stuff. I can't really say anything more than that. I know how to process the transactions, but I know very little about what goes on behind the scenes. At the end of the day we send all our paper work to a proofing center who double checks it and then sends it on to the Federal Reserve. Checks drawn on other banks get sent to their processing centers where they then get around to releasing the funds. That's the extent of my knowledge of the behind the scenes action. Have I been in this situation? Yes.. many many many many times. Until this year we practically lived on our over-draft protection from our bank. Most of the time they would cover overdrafts, but of course I'd have the $34 fees from the bank. In order to pay our bills and buy food and cover everything else we needed we'd usually purposely overdraw our account. Since hubby's check was direct deposited every week we could cover the overdrafts fees.. but that would leave us short the following week so we'd need to overdraw again.. and it became a crazy snowball effect. Hubby was so mad that everytime he got a bonus.. where we should have like $1,000 in our account, we only had the amount of a typical paycheck because of all the NSF fees we'd accrued ate up his bonus. So the depression would lead us to do something stupid like go out to eat at Red Lobster with all the kids.. which left us short on bill money, which caused us to overdraw again. We've been so much better this year. Our account has not been overdrawn since January 25 of this year. We haven't exactly been perfect. There've been times we've written checks on Thursday knowing the funds aren't in the account, but the check wouldn't be cashed till Friday so we'd know we were okay. Or there was a debit out there somewhere that wasn't posting yet, so we'd use those funds and basically float till Friday. Thankfully the debit didn't go through and overdraw us. But we have gotten a lot smarter. I've been keeping much better track of our account balance, and I've yelled at hubby 100 times about him checking our online balance instead of asking me what is our actual balance. He's better at asking me before he spends money because he's finally understanding that there are checks floating around out there so he can't trust our online balance. And I've gotten better at saying no to tempting things like going out to eat when I know we don't have the funds, or we have bills looming. Having the extra cash from my job has helped tremendously too. That little bit extra every week has given us pretty much exactly what we need to get by and sometimes have a little bit of fun. Only trouble is that little bit extra still isn't enough for me! Why does it seem like no matter how hard you try, you can never earn enough money for everything you want?

I dunno about renaming yourself because in this situation, bounce works as well. LOL. Okay, our bank I guess is one of the good banks because when they process all transactions at the end of the day, they will credit the deposits before they will process the debits from the account and they also process the transactions from the smallest amount to the largest amount to keep minimize the possiblity of overdraft charges. In the nine years that we've been with that bank, there has only been one time that we've been charged with an overdraft fee.

bounce58, I believe you can actually call the bank manager or someone at the overdraft department to have your situation redressed and waived the insufficient fund fees on both sides. Banks nowadays do not take likely when at clearance finds that you lack the balance for reconciliation. It is just standard procedure and practice. In your case, there are some time differences between the timings for clearance and reconciliation. You just need to be wary of it and call your creditor to present your check one day later. With the available tools like internet banking and phone banking to make use of, it is really on you to avoid such a charge. Since this is an exceptional case, I am quite sure your bank could grant you a waiver but would be subjected to certain legitimate reasons like your good standing with the bank or the first time for this incident. I am really careful with my check payments and even though I have an overdraft facility for my current account, I have never actually used it till today. So, do be careful in the future and you may consider applying an overdraft facility for your account to avoid another fiasco like this one.

*moo* Does that answer your question? The real question is, even if a human was doing it? would they process the credit first, or let the debit go through?? banks get more money, they get more money.. ?

Hi bounce, Sometimes the caused of this is, due to system error. Please do not be offended because most common problem of such case is, funds was deposited late. Bank has cut-off time for inward and outward checks. They imposed bank penalty for this stamped your personal check "Insufficient Fund", your maintaining bank charged you same with the depository bank where your client deposited your check. If ever this was bank error/mistake, you can make a complain to your depository bank by written or verbal complain in order for them to review status of your account and if found it was their mistake, the charges debited to your account will be credited back as it is. There's no milky bank transaction because all transactions were supported by documents.

I think it's just an excuse for banks to make extra money off peoples' silly mistakes. I get charged a lot for having insufficient funds. I have a savings and checking account with bank of america and I only keep a little bit in the checking account at a time and the savings is just money that I got back from school from my scholarship. I always forget to monitor how much I have in there and what the minimum required balance is. Apparently it's 25 dollars and when my account goes below that I get charged. Now, banks are even starting to charge a monthly fee for having and using a debit card, which I think is ridiculous. Then, at a different bank where I keep my actual savings account I can go in with coins and have them turned into cash for free. Well, I went in today to do it and now they're charging a fee for that too. All these fees are getting annoying and it's making me start to dislike banks.

I have never faced such incidents. I always keep sufficient balance in my bank account. However I have some information about realizing charges by the bank for this type of incidents. As you mention that banks normally debit all negative transactions first and then credits deposits is not true. Banks debits or credits as first come first serve basis. If they debited your instruments first, obviously it was present first and that time your account was insufficient balance. Your deposits came later.

Anyway, banks are commercial institutions, and they will try every single way to rip us off from anyway they see fit. So, what is the real story behind all this? I just got a bit confused after reading your post. So, you got insufficient fund in your account, which mean you use your checking account done some shopping lately, and you don't have enough money to pay for it from your account? And also, the place you write a check to, they bounced the check and they charged you for it? It seems logical, if you already knew you don't have enough money.