Welcome to Gaia! ::

You are not going to be recieving paper statements on your cd anymore. There are three ways to get this information now. It is not the end of the world. Really, it's not.

I hate that in the present age if you don't have a checking account that you can't do anything much with your money. This is the third time in 6 months that my bank has charged me an overdraft fee on a purchase made 4 days before. How the blazes am I supposed to keep track of my finances when you don't remove the money until days after the purchase? And the rote answer that I get from every single employee, including the branch manager, isn't helping with the fact that I really want to find someone to throttle. If a purchase is made on Friday it was made on Firday, not Monday, not Tuesday. I am sick and tired of you taking $37.50 out of my account every time you feel like it and not being able to give me a decent explination or tell me how you even came to the conclusion that I overdrafted when there's still a blasted POSITIVE balance!

I also had problems keeping track of my money. I recommend getting checks from the bank. Usually the first few are free. It comes with a ledger where you can write down what checks you wrote and to whom, as well as the new balance after that. I would just use that ledger to keep track of every purchase you make and update your balance constantly. That way you won't have to rely on the electronic version that does not update immediately.

also keep this in mind -- just because you purchased it on Friday doesn't mean the purchase was settled on Friday. If you made it with a check card, it goes through a settlement processes. You can see this most readily with gas purchases. The pump charges $1, holds as much as they can (I saw a costco doing an authorization hold of $100 for a $17.

So that $1 is what shows up in your pending until both, say Visa, who underwrites your check card and the vendor agree and settle for the $17.

So yeah, keep a register. Don't run your debit as a credit, run it only with your pin. Electronic registers aren't automatic, we still have to wait for settlement, clearing, etc.

I think a lot of the time when you're learning imperfect and asked to describe your childhood, they just want to say what you used to do as a kid. It could be as simple as "Cuando yo era niña, mi mamá me llevaba al parque y yo jugaba con los otros niños por el día entero." It doesn't have to be much more complicated than that. If I were you I would just avoid mentioning having to go to the hospital and having to move because those would be considered things you did infrequently, while you would use the imperfect to describe things that happened fairly often in the past.

Why run it only with pin? What is the difference?

Do you know why banks do that? I remember my mother explaining that to me when I first got a debit card, but I never did understand the reasoning behind it. That would be cool to know.