Psychological scam from my bank

[twuoo]

I opened up a Flagstar bank account in December.

Recently, I made a deposit. It shows an "account balance" and an "available balance."

In my other bank, the two amounts might be different if say I'm waiting for a check to clear. So one might actually be more than the other. Pretty standard.

Well, after my check posted to the Flagstar acct, I noticed my available balance was $1500 MORE than my account balance. At first, I thought "hey, did I just win a small lottery???" .....no such chance! It's a bank afterall.

No, something much more nasty than that. Flagstar puts in an "extra" $1500 into your account and makes it "available". If you happen to tap into that portion of your account, you get slapped with overdraft fee charge of around $32-35 (I think).

So for those of us who may live paycheck to paycheck, that extra $1500 sounds pretty nice until you start racking up the fees every time you tap into it.

To me, this is such a scam!

[deadbroke99]

It's called overdraft protection. I don't think it's a scam at all. I am very thankful for it. It has saved me from bouncing checks once in the past when I messed up. I only had to pay the bank fees and not the fees the persons I wrote the checks to would have charged. You just need to remember to not include that 1500 into you balance.