maybe you have never lived through a period of sustained financial stress. Yes, people in that situation understand that it takes a few days for a check to clear. One of those checks is your paycheck, which you need to clear to cover your other costs. The other is the check you wrote to the grocery store so you could eat, or your rent check. Which clears first? Did you time it right? What if your paycheck was delayed by a day?

Money in vs money out is very hard to keep track of when you don't have a buffer and you are always balancing empty.

I want to make an analogy to a seemingly simple buy known hard computer science problem, like resolving bugs caused by race conditions. Stuff which is simple if you can assume a single processing thread can become a nightmare when this assumption does not hold.

This is true. Having an extra few hundred dollars made a huge difference to me since I was always juggling the payday vs rent money as well.

Credit cards are not easy to get with no credit history either. I eventually was able to get a card but it had a $250 limit.

Banks used to structure these charges to create overdrafts whenever possible. They made it very difficult for you to see what your actual usable balance is.

They also used to be allowed to simply reject the transaction if you didn't have the money and still charge a $36 fee. It was insanity.

If your checking balance never reaches close to zero, you wouldn't notice this. I was a teenager in 2010 and definitely got hit with a bunch of overdraft fees. Banks know these fees are bullshit (even now, with increased regulation), that's why they're so quick to waive them at first.

In 2006 PayPal tried to deduct ~$500 dozens of times in a 48 hour period due to what was obviously a software bug. This resulted in me being overdrawn by around $900. No matter who I spoke to on the phone with Bank of America, nor which branch manager I met with in person, nobody could do anything to help me.

The most I accomplished was having a branch manager agree to waive 1 overdraft fee since I had never overdrafted my account before.

PayPal was even less helpful.

If I enable overdraft protection with my current bank (Wells Fargo) then they will charge me something like $17 to transfer money from my savings account to cover a charge that my primary account wouldn't have enough funds to cover.

This was a good reminder that I need to switch banks. Maybe I can find a good Credit Union in my area.

Anecdata: I overdrafted a few months in to having my credit union account. The bank manager literally called me on the phone that day and asked if I could come in and cover the charges. I couldn't because I was too far away or out of town or something. Manager asked if I could come in the next day, to which I said yes, and did, and received no overdraft fees.

Another credit union (which I have since left) in my area was a total nightmare to do business with. 6-10 transactions were met with shocking resistance and frustration. Check reviews for your propsective bank if possible.

> This was a good reminder that I need to switch banks.

When you do, try your best to do what I've done ever since my mortgage processor screwed up and double charged me: never use anyone else's online services; do all the banking that's possible from your bank's online bill pay. At least that way the people who are pushing money out of your account via automation report up through the same people who manage the rest of your account ;)

Also, credit unions seem to be happy to let you maintain an account with a balance but no fee in a way that banks aren't. As a result, I have my main checking account that I use for everything, and a second account at a completely unrelated institution where I keep 30 days worth of cash. I spent $10 for che(que|ck)s and an hour of time getting it set up, which was well worth buying me a month of insulation against any number of risks.

You must not be familiar with the banks' previous tendency to rig the game and make sure the charges all hit your account and in the most profitable sequence before the deposit was applied?[0]

[0]https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsred...

I wrote about how this happened to me in a comment here (8 years ago, dang!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424493