Via Laura Rowley in Yahoo Finance, of all places:

Last year, overdraft and insufficient-funds charges totaled nearly $35 billion and comprised about 90 percent of banks' consumer-fee income, according to a study by the consulting firm Bretton Woods Inc. Three-quarters of banks automatically enroll consumers in their "overdraft protection" programs without formal permission, and more than half of banks manipulate the order in which checks are cleared to trigger multiple overdraft fees, according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study. ...

Someone who overdraws a checking account a few times a year should choose a bank with a program that makes it easy (and free) to shift funds from savings to checking to protect against overdrafts.

The banks deemed overdraft protection to be a customer service convenience that provides an alternative to payday lenders, says [Jo Preuninger, a former management consultant who spent more than a decade in the consumer banking arena]. And yet some of those customers might almost fare better with loan sharks. The Bretton Woods study found 80 percent of overdraft fees are incurred by 20 million households, who paid an average of $1,374 in overdraft fees.

Yay!

NOTE Join a credit union!