Aren't Banks Supposed to Help us Keep Our Money?

 First of all, the best and only true way to keep track of your money and avoid paying overdraft fees is to keep track of your finances in a book or spreadsheet each time you use a credit card or debit. 

Everyone should know this because you cannot rely on banks to be able to inform you accurately about how much money you actually have in your account. 

If you go to an ATM to print out a receipt telling you how much you have in your checking account and go by that, you are asking for trouble. 

In our modern, high-tech civilization that we live in, it still takes banks days to clear a check even if it is written electronically and transmitted to them at the speed of light.  This means that the amount that the ATM tells you is in your account may not be correct and if you have an electronic check on hold somewhere out there, you could be set up to pay more than you would for a speeding ticket. 

Let's say, for example, you check your checking account balance at an ATM and it says you have $20 availible to you.  But, the day before you used your debit card to make a purchase of $15.  This transaction hasn't registered yet on your account but still counts against your balance meaning you acually only have $5 in the account.

Now, let's say that under the false impression that you have $20 (when you really only have $5) in your account you go out and spend $6 with your debit card.  You are now over-drawn and responsible for paying any over-draft fee that is standard with your bank, often being upwards of $30-$40 per day.

Considering the fact that at this point you believe that you still believe you have $14 in your account, you don't think it important to but anymore money in the account right away so you let it sit. 

You know you don't have enough to go to the ATM for cash so you don't even realize you are over-drawn (in many cases) until you finally decide you have time to go to the bank and find out that a good chunk of your hard-earned paycheck now belongs to your bank. 

Go ahead, try argueing how much the machine said you had.  They have a computer showing the day every transaction you made took place as if that was the day the money was actually deducted from the account and you were supposed to know. 

So now it's your fault for being too busy to keep track of every single dollar you spent and trusting the bank to be fair and forth-right. 

Their system's tardiness is something you should know about.  It's not their responsibility to make sure you know how much you have.

Now fork over that money you spent hours behind a desk, counter, steering wheel, etc. to earn because sorry, it's their money now.