Chase account balance alerts explained
Thanks to this article about Chase adding texting features to their account balance alert service, I now understand why their balance alerts are useless; they aren’t sent out until the end of the day.
Think about this for a second. Something happens during the day, presumably unexpected, which pulls your account balance below and amount that you want to know about. If this happens early in the day, lots of other things can happen before you find out about it. By the time you get the alert, it may very well be too late.
Kinda worthless. But I think Chase knows this. If they told you in a timely fashion that a problem might occur, they might not make as much in fees.
Bad bad Chase, Ineptitude | admin May 25, 2010
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By coakl, January 11, 2011 @ 10:49 am
The real problem is that both the bank and the customer are eagerly using technology to replace old-fashioned check registers.
Customers are lazy and have gotten spoiled by online banking. But using that to replace your register is a mistake. In fact, customers, more than ever before, willingly take their accounts down to a few dollars or cents. The ease of use of debit cards is a big contributing factor. They think that their cell phones or online banking will save them. This is an overdependence on technology, over basic financial common sense
Before all this technology, customers typically kept a higher balance. Even a “mental floor” (i.e. don’t go below it) of $50 or $100 would prevent most overdrafts. Banks, of course, will happily rake in the fees from those who lose track of their many transactions.
Keeping a paper register and writing down every transaction, including upcoming ones that you know will hit within a month, is the only real solution.