State Employees' Credit Union of Raleigh, N.C., has added Overdraft Fee Free Days to its traditional checking account product. Every SECU checking account enrolled in the overdraft protection program will now automatically have overdraft transfer fees waived for two days each calendar year. Overdraft funds will be transferred from the protecting account as needed to cover items in a member's checking account, but members will not be charged any overdraft transfer fees for those two days.

The addition of Overdraft Fee Free Days follows numerous account enhancements to assist members who simply make an occasional calculation mistake. One such complementary program launched at the beginning of 2010 is NSF Fee Free Days, which allows members to have $12 nonsufficient funds fees waived on two days during the year, regardless of the number of items marked as NSF on either of the two days.

While SECU returns the items to the payee, CU fees are waived to ease the financial burden to the member. Other recent enhancements include SECU's Another Chance Program, which provides mobile alerts and an additional day for members to cover inadvertent overdrafts without fee, return or embarrassment, and Two-Way Text Messaging, which allows members to receive current account balances and account history notifications via text message. In 2010, these combined overdraft enhancements helped save SECU members more than $5 million in potential NSF charges, according to the CU.