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.
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/best-high-yield-interests-savings-accounts/
This was the first result that I searched. You can get a HYS with a little to no minimal balance. A lot of them are online banks, but they’re still FDIC insured. There are plenty HYS accounts out there that are usable for everyday people given you have the ability to save.
Every link went to forbidden as I am not currently in the US. So that was interesting. Then when I did check these rates in the small print I got only with a new account, subject to change, etc. That is a the scummy part I was talking about. I guess if one hoped they could get that rate for at least 6 months and were willing to shuffle it to another bank every so often, it could work.