The $440 Pizza

Based on an article by the Elevations Credit Union Team from Boulder, Colorado

One night my friend and I pitched in for pizza.

As always, I was out of cash. So when the pizza came I wrote a check for $13. Life went on...

The next week I got mail from my bank. "Just another financial statement," I thought. I stuck the unopened envelope in my desk drawer along with other bank stuff. Nothing unusual.

Soon I began getting a bunch of mail—more bank statements and stuff from a company called "CheckRight." I dropped the bank stuff in my desk drawer, but the other mail looked like junk, so naturally, I trashed it.

Then I got the call from CheckRight, a collections company hired by the pizza store. The $13 check had bounced.

They said I owed $50 for processing fees. But since I hadn't answered the mail they sent me, that $50 went up to $80 on top of the $13 bounced check.

What???

I called my bank. Sure enough, the check had bounced. To make things worse, the bank had automatically deducted another $25 from my account for a Non-Sufficient Funds (NSF) fee. That adds up to a grand total of $118. What an expensive pizza!

But trouble didn't stop there. Turns out all those bank "statements" were actually more NSF notices. I'd bounced four more checks. Each time a $25 fee was deducted from my account. That's another $100 that I threw away.

Four months later, I finally made things right by paying off the bounced checks. I also balanced my checkbook and set up overdraft protection so this wouldn't happen again. Lesson learned: Keep track of your money and read your bank statements to avoid surprises.