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.
Yeah, you’re not going to be able to get a guaranteed rate on a HYS account. The upside is that the interest rate is high. The downside is that the interest rate will change, usually down, as the market changes, but something is better than nothing. You have to find the balance between maximizing returns and maximizing effort. If you want more that a 3-4% return, you’re likely going to have to start looking into an investment account, but a 3-4% return is still better than the 0.2% return a traditional savings account provides.