Man, no offense, but you sound like someone who has never worked paycheck to paycheck. I'm not endorsing his banking scheme, but I can sympathize with the shityt overdraft fees are.

Also "seem to come in order" is not really good enough when you are down to 5 or 10 dollars left. Also, I have seen many examples of banks processing things out of order to maximize the overdraft fees. Ie. processing larger transactions before smaller ones that occured before them chronologically, so that a number of 4 or 5 dollar purchases would end up each having a $35 overdraft fee.

For 95% of situations it would be much more in the customers interest to just reject the transactions. But the banks make a killing off of exploiting the people who can least afford it (those with almost no money in their account).

edit: downvotes? Anyone care to actually tell me what is downvote worthy in this post? The guy's recommendation to "subtract 1000" from whatever your balance is is totally infeasible for a large portion of the population.