Fort Knox Credit Union.
So I have their 5% gas card, and in doing so, requires me to have a $5 share with them, no different than any other CU.
Well, the other day I noticed my share went to $4 due to a $1 fee. I suspect the $1 fee was due to me not having "electronic statements" turned on. So I fixed that. I figured that I better deposit $1 before I get a letter stating that I am below my minumum share requirement.
At this point, i realize that I never setup external transfers from my main bank (USAA). I had the 5% gas card setup for pay, but not the savings account itself. I figured I would never need it. So I do the two mini trial deposits. Not thinking that my main bank also pulls them back almost at the same instance, so it was treated as a "withdrawal with NSF" since the mini deposits had not cleared yet.
I understand the how & why of what happened, but I emailed Fort Knox to see if they will waive the $30 NSF fee in this instance. But lesson learned. I would have been better off mailing them a $1.00 check or seeing if they could run my debit card over the phone for $1.00.
Just wanted to post this so someone else could learn from my experience.
Yes,
I do realize that my balance was actually zero. Otherwise, my post would have been titled "Why was I charged NSF fees when I really had $5?"
And yes, I should have setup the external transfer account from Fort Knox's side. However, they are old school and that is not something you can set up on their website. It's a phone call to a CSR and they set it up.
They did refund my NSF fees within hours of my email. My post was mainly a PSA to anyone trying to add an external account to an account with nothing or almost nothing in it. Granted, you probably have bigger problems if your account is at zero. But in this case, as well as all my other credit union shares, I have the minimum just to use their credit card(s).
My only real irritation with them is that they charged a $1 to my share account. I would have rather they charged my credit card, given I even had a -$2 balance on it.
Live & learn.
@Anonymous wrote:When CU requires maintaining $5 minimum balance for membership, your "available balance" is actually $0, therefore even if you had $5 in there, the trial deposit issue would have happened regardless because your "available balance" would have been $0 instead of -$1.
This is a known issue and the cause is 2 fold. First, some banks assume you have a balance at the target account and send 2 trial deposits and pull back at the same time, second, some banks receives these transactions in the order of deposit-withdrawal-deposit, instead of deposit-deposit-withdrawal, combination of the two creates the NSF situation.
The solution is to make sure the target account has at least $1 available balance, or use an origin account that sends out withdrawal request at least a day after the 2 trial deposits. In your case you would have been ok adding your USAA to Fort Knox then ACH pull funds from Fort Knox.
How can one know which origin accounts sends out withdrawal request at least a day after the 2 trial deposits in advance?
The trail deposits and withdrawal are computer generated and is usually done is seconds. I do not see how one can intervene to stop the NSF from happening. Am I missing something here?
The same issue happened to me when I was much younger. I blame this on the receiving institution trying to maximize profits by reordering the deposits and withdrawals to cause the NSF's.
@Anonymous wrote:I just had this happen to me. Wish I had seen this post before I tried to add my account. My credit union did also reverse the NSF fee for a one-time exception.
I have a follow up question though. Did you receive any kind of fee from the verifying account/USAA end, and did they eventually try to pull the trialcredit from your account again after the NSF?
Absolutely no fee from USAA's end, and they only did the trial deposits once.
And it's worth stating again that Fort Knox reversed the NSF.
Also, when joining any new banks or credit unions (mainly for their checking or cc SUB), I put in an extra $10 or $20 now to avoid this problem.
So they never ended up withdrawing the initial trial deposit after the NSF? That’s a small profit on your end then 
@Anonymous wrote:So they never ended up withdrawing the initial trial deposit after the NSF? That’s a small profit on your end then
Sorry, I should have clarified:
My account went -$30.56. The trial deposits went in/out the first time.