US Bank customers be warned:
They eliminated the float on debit card transactions.
Check card transactions are now being debited from your account immediately — but this is not reflected directly on the website. The website just includes them in “funds held pending verification” — which sounds a lot like deposited funds, doesn’t it? It’s not.
Default behavior until recently was that funds were not removed from the available balance until transactions actually cleared. Now they are removed immediately, even though it is frequently several days before the transaction goes through.
So when I made a couple of charges the evening before payday, knowing that my paycheck would be in the account by 6 am the next morning to cover them (something that has never, ever been a problem before — and don’t tell me you’ve never done this), I was instead overdrawn — because though the actual funds to cover the charge would be in the account before the next business day, and the charge in question didn’t clear for 3 more days, apparently the new system immediately made those funds unavailable to me — hence, a $20 overdraft fee, and a bunch of money sucked out of my savings account that I wasn’t expecting.
So now US Bank enjoys the use of my money for a few days while denying me access to it. This is a scam to get more overdraft fees. The person from US Bank I talked to on the phone claimed it was because of customer requests. HA!
US Bank customers, you are warned. NO FLOAT.
