Tips to Help Avoid Overdraft Fees

Keep accurate records

Monitoring and reconciling checking account transactions are important for knowing your balance, avoiding overdrafts, and managing personal spending. Keeping accurate records also helps ensure someone isn’t using your checking account for fraudulent purposes.

Use direct deposit for your paycheck

You can have access to your paycheck immediately, which is faster than a paper check. Ask your employer or benefits provider about direct deposit today.

Transactions don’t necessarily clear ‘in order’

Customers should be aware account transactions, including checks, ATM transactions, and debit card purchases, may ‘clear’ an account at different times, and not necessarily in the order they were made. Keeping good records of all deposits and withdrawals is essential to knowing the actual available balance in your account.

Use caution when establishing automatic payments

Having the cable company or other service provider automatically take payments out of your account is a convenient option but can cause serious issues with your account balance. For example, different companies have different procedures for how they handle a payment due date falling on a holiday or weekend. It is your responsibility to know and understand your service providers’ authorizations with respect to the timing of your payments.

Check your balance and account transactions often

Heritage Bank offers many free and simple ways for customers to check their balances and monitor account activity—online with Heritage@Home, by telephone at 1-800-455-6126, at an ATM and in-person at one of our branches. Customers are encouraged to take advantage of these options to stay in touch with their account activity and balances. Keep in mind, however, those balances will not reflect transactions you may have authorized which have not yet been processed by the bank.

Link your checking account to a savings account or overdraft line of credit

Overdraft protection plans are an attractive alternative to overdraft fees. Heritage Bank offers a number of options that let customers use the money in their own account or from a pre-approved Line of Credit to cover checking account transactions in case of emergency or “just in case.” Ask us for additional information about the overdraft programs available to our checking account customers.

Heritage Bank offers a number of overdraft protection programs for the benefit of our customers

No one likes to bounce a check or have an electronic payment returned. For the occasional emergency or accounting error, we offer a number of overdraft protection programs to help give you peace of mind. If you qualify, all three types of protection (or a combination of the three) can be applied to your accounts. 

Classic Reserve Line

• Line of Credit guards against overdraft fees for your personal checking account
• Once approved, line of credit advances deposit automatically in $100.00 increments into your account
• $24.00 annual fee

Overdraft Protection

• Sets your savings account as overdraft protection for your checking account
• Transfers made in $50.00 increments to cover overdrafts; $5.00 fee per transfer
• No overdraft charges to your checking account if you have sufficient funds in your savings account

Overdraft Plus

• We'll consider, without obligation on our part, payment of your reasonable overdrafts up to your assigned Overdraft Plus limit, including $29.00 per item fee.
• Eligible transaction types include, ACH, ATM*, Visa CheckCard transactions*, online banking bill payments/transfers and telephone banking transfers up to the predetermined overdraft limits on your account. *As part of Federal Regulation E, customers must “opt-in” to receive this service on ATM and one-time debit card transactions beginning August 5th, 2010 for current customers and July 1, 2010 for new customers.