shakran

Not really (though I appreciate you saying I had it spot on later ). It doesn't make sense because if the bank tallies up the charges/deposits at the end of the day ( or any time, really, throughout the day. Doesn't matter if it's morning or night), then unless you are in the habit of making only decreasing value purchases in any one day - i.e. whatever you spend at one transaction, you MUST spend LESS at the next, and so on- Unless you do that, it doesn't make sense that the day's transactions are ALWAYS processed largest first unless they are being deliberately shuffled into that order.

Further the idea that "we're protecting the $1000 withdrawal by docking you for the $1 withdrawals" argument fails to hold water at all. You have "overdraft protection," which is really another name for "unlike the old days when hitting your limit would stop the transaction and keep your finances safe, we're going to let you think you have enough money until you get the NSF notice from us at which point you owe us a squillion dollars." If that big transaction at the end of the day would overdraw your account by $50, they're going to cover it just as they would cover a smaller transaction that would overdraw your account by $50. Claiming they're protecting large transactions by processing them first is just playing smoke and mirrors with numbers.

The banks are not out to protect your money. They are not out to help you keep your money any more than any other business is out to help you keep your money. The point of a business is to take money from you. Many businesses do so ethically, by giving you something of value in return. The overdraft protection scheme is not an example of such fairness.

This is important so I will say it again. If you don't have enough money in your account to pay for something, and the transaction is stopped as a result, then you haven't lost anything. You have the same amount of money as you did before. You just don't get to take home that Snickers bar quite yet. But if the bank, without asking you, "covers the overdraft for a courtesy fee," then you have just paid $36 for a Snickers bar. How exactly is this protecting your money? How is this in your financial best interest? The simple answer is, it is not. It is funneling your money into the bank's coffers.

What we have here, and no offense is intended to Lindy or her sister, but "them's the facts," as they say, is a person who is a direct beneficiary of the dishonest decreasing-value-processing scam trying to defend that scam. The more NSF fees that regional bank in Kansas takes in, the more money the bank makes, which not only equates to more money in the paycheck of Lindy's sister, but also job security for Lindy's sister. Such a biased source is not the final bastion of truth when it comes to banking practices.

Now Lindy's sister does bring up a good point that it is technically illegal for a bank not to process withdrawals first. But they get around this by having a "2-3 day waiting period" for deposits. Why does this matter? Because of electronic checking. You may not realize it, but when you write a check these days, it doesn't work like it did in the past. The check information is entered into a computer, and is immediately sent to your bank. It doesn't take two or three days for the check to find its way through the bank's systems before someone enters the information. By the time you bag your groceries, the bank already has the check in electronic form.

Why does this matter? In the first place, it belies the notion that various transactions come in at different times of day and therefore it's OK that the check you wrote at 9am is processed after the one you wrote at 2pm. In the second, think about what this means. The bank can instantaneously take money out of your account, without running it through a clearing process, but the check that you deposit to the bank, despite being entered into their systems right away, takes "2-3 days to process."

It's frankly a load of bunk. If the bank wanted to it could process the deposit check immediately by electronically sending the check to the bank of whoever wrote it, just like the grocery store does with your check. But, it's not in the bank's best interest to do that, because then your deposit would cover transactions that they could otherwise charge you NSF fees for.