Budgeting and Debit Cards, Banks Deliberate Practices

I know many people on the spectrum have problems with budgetting and I have tried to solve this mainly by not having any credit cards, however over the years I have had debit cards but still got into trouble.

This is because of the banks - and what I see as a practice that is there to deliberately confuse you. When you use a debit card many times the money does not come out of your account straight away - and in some instances it can take even a week. This means you can check your balance and assume you have money when in fact you don't. To me this is deliberately done by the banks in order to get you to make a mistake and spend money you haven't got, because if you do make a mistake then they can charge you and therefore make money out of that mistake.

What I don't understand is that surely they have the technology to update the account immediately after a transaction. I can't think of any other reason why they don't apart from it being to try to hoodwink you.

Sometimes I may have for example £150 in my account and I pay for something, then 4 or 5 days later I check my balance and theres £50 so I take it out for something else only for the next day to see a balance of -£42. Sometimes I just lose track, now I don't even know if I have £88 or if the money was taken out for somethings I bought last week. Sometimes transactions don't even come up on the statement for a week but the money gets taken out and sometimes they come up on the statement immediately but the money doesn't get taken out for a week.

This just has to be deliberate because if they money was deducted immediately and came up one the statement immediately then the bank would no doubt end up losing a lot of money every week that's brought in by people making mistakes.

Does anyone else have these problems or can anyone recommend a debit card that really does not let you spend money you don't have ?

  • I have always had a problem with the fact that things don't clear straight away.  In the days when I had time and used cheques (which I rarely do now) I used to keep a running total of cash machine withdrawals on my cheque stubs with up-to-date balances so I knew what I really had.  I would also check off every single item on my bank statements in case they had taken something they shouldn't have.

    These days I simply don't have the time to do this, but it is always in the back of my mind that I have not tallied it all up for years, and that will always bother me.

    I keep all my bank statements and bills going back a long time (extreme systemiser with a high SQ score!)  You should see my files of stuff.

    I don't think the banks do it to con Aspies, I just think they have generally money-grabbing techniques and it's all biased in their favour, they are a business after all.  But this is why the government sometimes brings in certain rules and laws as bankers (ironically appropriate Cockney rhyming slang there Wink) are known to take advantage.

  • When I was a teenager, I had a bank account that wouldn't ever let me spend more than I had in my account and if I tried to spend more than I had the card would be declined. I'd have thought to be able to do this, you'd need payments to be deducted automatically and if that's the case then why does it not work that way for adult accounts.

    I have ended up being in my overdraft more than once or twice because a payment hasn't been taken when I thought it should have been.

  • I've always tried to keep extra cash in my bank account, even though I get no interest that way, to avoid having that anxiety. And I do my utmost to avoid running into it, even though it ends up as dead money.

    There have been times when I've been living very close to the limit, but I've always stuck to this principle. The wicked bank gets the interest on my reserve, but its worth it for the piece of mind.

    I always carry at least a fiver in a safe place, in case I lose my wallet.