On-line banking transfers can fail

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Here is a little cautionary story. I have been using on-line banking to transfer money between my accounts since 1997. It has always worked flawlessly; in fact I've grown so comfortable with it, that I stopped writing down confirmation numbers. You can probably see where this story is going.

One sunny day, I stopped by an ATM machine to get $20 for lunch. Terrified I discovered that my account balance was zero. Oh my... did somebody clean out my bank account? Nope, here is what happened:

Somehow, an earlier transfer of the money to the checking account did not go through. I made the transfer several days before, but there was no record of it. So, when payments started hitting the account it quickly became depleted, and an interesting, and expensive chain of events ensued:

1 ? as the account balance goes below certain threshold, a monthly service fee kicks in: $9.50
2 ? overdraft protection kicks in: $20
3 ? finance charge on the amount of money used for overdraft protection: $x
4 ? if you don't discover the problem right away, multiply the previous two lines by the number of times overdraft protection triggers
5 ? what happens if overdraft goes over the amount of your credit line with the bank? I don't know but I guess, that is very unpleasant, and probably will leave a mark on your credit report too.

Anyway. You can see, how a simple breakdown in the system that usually works can be very expensive. I recommend double-checking that your online transfers go through, and keep writing down those confirmation numbers.