I've already earned $9.48 in cash back using my new Pay Pal Debit card, and I think I have another $6.50 in pending. I was hoping I could also pay the health insurance monthly bill using it, but apparently I can only use my bank account. I am going to call and double check though. That would earn me $6.71 each month. I'm getting use to using it, but there are a couple of drawbacks. It takes a day or two to deduct from my checking, so I have to be careful I have enough to cover. This shouldn't really be a problem, unless I'm getting close to payday and low on funds, but I also have overdraft protection on my checking and as long as I deposit money by the end the day there is no fee. I check my balance daily, so this should be an issue. Not to mention, I budget pretty carefully, so I know beforehand if I'm getting low.
The other part I don't like is every transaction shows up on my checking as "paypal", so I can't go back an look up a specific transaction by merchant name. I can only get the detail on paypal, though I don't really see on there where you can search merchant names. Plus, I use Mint.com to see my spending category totals, and of course this won't work now that every thing is under one transaction/merchant name. I will miss having this, but for $20+ a month extra, just for doing nothing extra other than using the card, it will be worth giving up, I guess. I could manually categorize the expenses......ok, that's most likely NOT going to happen :)
I used to use the Paypal card, but it was hard to find places that required a pin like they required it. I do that with my credit cards now, but you are right that Paypal is a major pain to track on expenses. I ended up taking it off my Quicken accounts because it took me twice as much time to get it current than it took me to get all accounts updated.
ReplyDeleteI have that card somewhere in my drawer, it pays nicely but yea moving money to that account used to take 3 days... now I just use a regular CC with rewards. The cc is easier, faster and provides better protection for unauthorized purchases.
ReplyDeleteHS
Tanner - to get the 1% cash back I have to use it as a credit/signature based card, which I haven't had any problems with. I just chose the credit option when swiping my card at a store.
ReplyDeleteHS - I don't have to transfer any money from my checking to Paypal - my checking is my funding source, so it just automatically pulls from after there every transaction, it just takes a day or two to do it.