The FDIC: What's Insured & What's Not

Why this matters

The crypto balances frozen when FTX collapsed in 2022 sat inside accounts that felt exactly like a bank account, and none were protected by the FDIC. The instinct is to assume anything held at a financial company must be insured, and these fifteen customer scenarios exist to correct that, one account at a time.

Plenty of adults get this wrong too: $250,000 is not a hard ceiling on one account at one bank. A family stacking joint accounts and POD beneficiaries correctly can insure well past a million dollars there, and proving that with real scenarios lands harder than just stating the rule.

From one teacher to another

Riley is a new compliance trainee at a bank, handed fifteen real customer account scenarios and told to sort out what the FDIC actually protects before this quarter's disclosure audit, and students step straight into that stack of accounts. The instinct most of them start with is that anything sitting inside a bank must be insured, so I spend real time on the accounts that aren't, brokerage stocks, mutual funds, crypto balances, and a safe deposit box's contents, none of which the FDIC touches even when they're held at the exact same bank as a covered checking account. Where it gets interesting is the $250,000 limit itself, since it isn't one flat ceiling, joint accounts and POD beneficiaries each open up separate coverage at the same bank, and a family working the categories correctly can insure well past that number without ever opening a second bank account. By the end they're applying one defining test to every scenario Riley hands them and writing it up in an actual compliance memo.