It was one of the tools that allowed me to maintain healthy credit card usage habits. In my idle time when messing around on my phone I’d gotten into the habit of just transferring money from my checking account to my credit card, often in excess of my actual balance, so as to cover “pending” purchases.
Not only will my bank no longer let me do that, just to twist the knife a bit, they will let me make multiple payments totaling the pending total due so long as no individual payment exceeds my actual balance.
So it’s not that they can no longer handle negative balances on the card, it’s just that they’ve half-ass made the interface disallow it.
buncha folks talking about savings accounts and rates, its easier to think of accounts in three categories: loans, savings, demand. The last one being where the money’s available to you ‘on demand’ with no extra conditions – ie. a chequing account, or a ‘savings’ account with a low rate… because the money’s available on demand.
Higher rate savings accounts are common, I don’t know why people almost always seem confused by the notion. You get a term deposit/gic or whatever, where you lock money in for X period, to get a higher rate – and if you tap that money before the period’s over, you lose the interest.
Locked in deposit rates will almost always be about 1-2% lower than regular mortgage rates that people pay, with CUs using the difference for operation costs. So like my CU has mortgage rates just shy of 5% at the moment, and term deposit rates of around 2.7-3% give or take. A rate cut was just announced in Canada, so those will likely go down a bit this week.