Have you ever seen money in your bank or credit union account and when you tried to use it, find out it was not really there? Well, something like that happened to me. I think.
This past Tuesday, August 1, the usual deposits hit my account. I checked my account online to make sure that the deposits had been posted. They had. After seeing the deposit amounts I expected, I paid the rent from the account. Three days later I received a returned check charge from my landlord. I checked the account immediately. The money was still there. I went to the credit union and withdrew the amount for the rent and put it into another account and paid the rent, promptly. The next day I received another returned check charge from my credit union. I also received another deposit. I planned to go to the credit union to find out what was going on with my account. Before, I could get there, I received a text displaying a zero balance.
That afternoon as I sat in from of the customer service representative, my head started to spend after I repeated my story twice. I knew my story didn’t make any sense, but neither did what the representative was telling me. Finally, she turned her computer monitor towards me so that I could see the screen for myself and see exactly what she was saying. As soon as I saw the screen, I recognized the problem immediately.
The first discrepancy I discovered was that there were no entries for August 1. It appeared that money was in a pending status on August 1, but not really applied. The second discrepancy was that there no beginning balance for the month of August. Apparently, the deposits were posted online on August 1, but the money itself was not processed until August 4, the day I made the withdrawal. And, finally, the zero balance I received in the text was not showing at all. I pointed the discrepancies out to the representative and explained to her that what had occurred appeared to be a systems error and totally out of her hands. She offered to credit my account to make sure that all was well. All was well, after my account was properly credited.
The lesson I learned that day was simple. In the days of automatic clearinghouse (ACH), checks and payments can still be delayed by as long as three days. Also, money that appears online may not be in the account. Why? I can speculate that it’s possible that sometimes the credit unions are a little short-staffed and can’t always get their monies processed promptly. Or, every now and then the posting system moves faster than the cash processing system. Or even still, there maybe something else I dare not consider, such as the money was just not there. For whatever reason, it is now obvious to me that just because I have a direct deposit posted to my account, it doesn’t mean the actual money is really there.
Source: Dreamstime.co
Whats important to note is that it's not just any three days but three "banking days" so no weekend or holidays. In theory it can take up to 6 days to clear depending on weekends and holidays.
--IceBurst
Interesting. I hope they did not charge you bounced check fees.
Of course, they did. But, my account was credited.