Debit Card Overdraft Coverage

The Federal Reserve introduced regulations in 2010 that require banks and credit unions to get permission before charging overdraft fees for debit and ATM transactions. As a result, Affinity reassessed its Affinity Visa^® Debit Access card overdraft policies and introduced Debit Card Courtesy Pay, an optional service for members who would like standard debit card overdraft coverage. This service complements our existing Overdraft Protection Plan.

Understanding Your Affinity Visa^® Debit Access Card Overdraft Options

A debit card overdraft occurs when you do not have enough money in your checking account to cover a debit card transaction but Affinity pays it on your behalf. We can cover your debit card overdrafts in two ways:

• Overdraft Protection Plan: If you enroll in our Overdraft Protection Plan, we cover your overdrafts by transferring funds from another of your Affinity accounts, including savings, money manager, a separate checking account, Affinity PrivateLine line of credit, home equity line of credit¹, or any Affinity Visa Credit Card. Unlike many banks, we do not charge a fee for this service - there is no fee to sign up or to transfer funds. (If you are transferring funds from a line of credit or your Affinity Visa^® Credit Card, interest charges will apply.) The Overdraft Protection Plan covers not only debit card transactions and ATM withdrawals, but also checks, online bill payment, and automatic/recurring debit payments that you have set up.
• Debit Card Courtesy Pay: If you enroll in Debit Card Courtesy Pay, we may cover your everyday debit card overdrafts and ATM withdrawals on amounts up to $1500 (at our discretion²) at a fee of $25 per overdraft occurrence. There is no fee to enroll, and no charge if you never make an overdraft.

You may enroll in both the Overdraft Protection Plan and Debit Card Courtesy Pay. In this case, the Overdraft Protection Plan would act as your first line of defense, and Debit Card Courtesy Pay would act as a back-up if your linked account had insufficient funds.

If you are not enrolled in any of the above options, any Affinity Visa^® Debit Access card transactions that exceed your account balance will be declined.

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1 Not available in Texas.

2 We pay overdrafts at our discretion, which means we do not guarantee that we will always authorize and pay any type of transaction. For example, we typically would not authorize overdrafts if your checking account is not in good standing, if the account has not had a positive balance within the last 30 days, or if the account already has many overdrafts. The fact that we pay one of more items creating overdrafts does not obligate us to do so in the future.