Bad Check charges can be outrageous for consumers who don’t plan for emergencies.

Last week I was talking with someone who had to pay a $25.00 overdraft fee because they exceeded their checking account balance. One thing I did when I first started my checking account (over 20 years ago) was to insure this would never happen to me. What we did was not list our whole check into our checking account ledger. Lets say my check was $783.00 what we would do is only write down in our ledger $760.00 and place the other $23.00 in the back of our book under the term “secret savings”. We left this money alone and budgeted ourselves and kept adding money into our secret savings.

There were times that we needed money for some unseen obligations and transferred money from our secret savings to our regular account. Now I’m happy to say that we now are adding alot more into our “secret savings” every paycheck. Once we build this savings to a certain level we transfer it to our regular savings, however always keeping a nice emergency fund in reserve.

Now I know some people say this is a foolish thing to do, because we are not earning interest on that amount. But we have never had a late payment or an overdraft. Also our credit ratings are perfect. This might not be a good system for everyone, but I believe in it.