Question 1

What is FDIC insurance?

Accepted Answer

In 1933, Congress looked at a country where people had just lost their savings because their bank went under and decided that was a bad system. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was the fix. It guarantees the balance in covered deposit accounts at member banks up to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category. You do not sign up for it. You do not pay for it. Open a deposit account at an FDIC-member bank and coverage is there. The premium is paid by the bank, which is why banks advertise FDIC membership and non-banks do not.

Question 2

What actually happens when a bank fails?

Accepted Answer

The FDIC has a playbook. Bank fails on a Friday. By Monday morning, your insured deposits are available, usually at a healthy bank that agreed to acquire the failed one. Your account number is the same. Your direct deposit still arrives. You do not notice anything happened unless you watched the news. The balances that do not fit under the per-category limit are a different story. You become an unsecured creditor of the failed bank. Some depositors see most of it back when the FDIC liquidates the assets. Some wait years for a partial recovery. Some see nothing. This is the part the calculator exists to help you avoid.

Question 3

Are joint accounts really double-covered?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The joint-account category is insured up to $250,000 per co-owner, not per account. Two owners, $500,000. Three equal co-owners, $750,000. The FDIC applies this to each co-owner's equal share, which means every co-owner has to have equal withdrawal rights and be named on the account. And joint coverage stacks on top of each owner's separate single-account coverage at the same bank. Two married people with one joint savings account and two individual accounts at the same bank can carry $1,000,000 of coverage without doing anything clever. This is not a loophole. It is the rule.

Question 4

Are IRAs and retirement accounts separately insured?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, SEP-IRAs, SIMPLE IRAs, self-directed Keogh plans, and self-directed defined-contribution plan accounts each sit in their own ownership category insured up to $250,000. That sits on top of your single, joint, and trust coverage at the same bank. The household that stacks multiple categories correctly can carry well over a million dollars of coverage at one bank. The household that opens five single-ownership CDs at one bank because five accounts feels safer than one is carrying exactly $250,000 of coverage on the whole pile. The difference is the ownership category, not the number of accounts.

Question 5

What is not covered by FDIC insurance?

Accepted Answer

Deposits are covered. Checking, savings, money-market deposit accounts, CDs, cashier's checks. That is the list. Not covered: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, annuities, life insurance, municipal securities, the contents of your safe-deposit box, Treasury bills held directly through TreasuryDirect, and every crypto asset ever invented. Money-market mutual funds are also not covered even though the name sounds almost identical to a money-market deposit account. The names are close on purpose. The protection is not. Securities held in a brokerage account get SIPC coverage instead, which is a different program with different rules and different limits and will not help you if the stock went to zero.

Account	Type	Balance	Limit	Uninsured
Chase checking	Single / individual	$280,000	$250,000	$30,000
Joint savings	Joint	$420,000	$500,000	—
Traditional IRA	IRA / retirement	$185,000	$250,000	—
Totals · 97% covered			$855,000 covered	$30,000 uninsured

How much of your cash is actually insured?

List every account at this bank

FDIC Coverage Summary

FDIC coverage, explained.

Retirement Drawdown

Recession Stress Test