If writing a check with insufficient funds is done with the expectation they will be covered by payday it is called playing the float

Heh, I'd bet that many people do this, though not with checks per se.

I...err...a friend, up until last year when they changed how it worked, used to do this with the PayPal debit card. All transactions would take 3 business days to actually pull the money out of the bank account. So if you needed to pay a bill or whatever on either Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday but you don't get paid until Friday you could use the PayPal debit card on any of those days.

Then the bastards changed it after like 10 years so that you could only use the debit card with settled funds in the PayPal account, which made it utterly useless because that same 3 days applied to transfer money into your PayPal account so you needed to transfer money into PayPal 3 days ahead of when you wanted to use it.

What a shame though because even if you had the money in your bank account for a purchase the PP debit card was still nice to use because it offered a 1% cash back on a debit card

Ofc the whole thing was probably a scheme to get people to keep money on their PayPal account (Which you should never ever do).