Some US banks charge "maintenance fees" if an account doesn't have a high enough balance, so he may have needed to wait for a large reserve to build up before using his debit card for daily purchases.
e.g. Wells Fargo currently requires a minimum $1500 daily balance (or direct deposits coming in, or mortgage payment going out- neither of which are applicable here) otherwise they charge $10/month in fees. Add to this the "creative accounting" some banks use to settle debits from day-to-day, and other nuances of ACH (no fraud protection, 5 days to dispute transactions, etc.) that make payment by check or debit card non-trivial for the inexperienced.
I've been fascinated recently with out-of-line documentation, I was inspired by this project: https://github.com/adobe/hyde
A more robust implementation would parse the code to object-code, then emit a document(s) for the developer to fill in.
The killer feature of such a system is that non-code changes (whitespace, etc.) would not trigger a need to re-document, but seemingly benign changes that affect distant parts of code (or a -O4 being added to the Makefile) would trigger a round of documentation
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05814