[jkestner]

Don't forget to read all your EULAs!

Not everyone can afford to educate themselves on every consequence of every interaction with a corporation that is actively trying to obscure those consequences. I'm generally not ignorant, and I naively thought last week that if I transferred some money into a checking account on the same day that a payment was taking the balance below zero, I'd end up positive when the transactions were run at the end of the day. I got dinged $35.

[Karunamon]

See, this is an instance of the bank clearly being a dick, for lack of a better term. The money was there, you were being responsible, you still got dinged. This is wrong.

Now, how much do you want to bet that's not the case on some high-90s percentage of overdrafts?

The comparison to EULAs is specious at best. It's not like it's some legalese small print buried halfway through a lengthy document - they're disclosed separately and prominently, in part, because they're legally forced to.

[jkestner]

I think the EULA comparison is valid because in my case, the rules that explain that behavior (perhaps a transfer from another bank may take "1-3 days to be accessible") are also probably written somewhere, but the overall amount of noise, added to the noise of my daily worries, means that I'm likely to miss it.

I'm not going insert into the conversation a guess of what percentage of overdrafts are fair/unfair. I agree that many overdrafts are the exclusively fault of the account holder, but I tend to grant leeway when the bank has a general history of "being a dick."