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.
Where is this mythical high yield savings account?
One that earns you more than the default 0.15% or so that you earn on most savings accounts.
You have to do a bit of hunting, but for example, I have an account with Citizens Access that earns 3.50% last time I checked. It’s not much, but it’s better than earning nothing on the emergency fund that I want to keep liquid and accessible.