[GOTCHA] P2P Payment Systems

Good to know about this stuff, Bob. Thanks. I regularly use Google Pay to pay my proofreader. It's checking account to checking account, no fee. I have no idea how long it takes for her checking account to show the deposit but I'm sure it's not an issue. I get an email about the payment within minutes, which of course gets saved as a PDF in my 2018 tax detail folder.

What about Bitcoin? Is that not a viable option?

Try Zelle. Works great using only a cell phone number or email address. www.zellepay.com I use it all of the time with little to no issues.

Venmo is for people who like to brag about the great restaurants you're eating at and the fancy vacation places you're at. It is primarily a venue for trying to make other people jealous about the glorious life you're leading.

Except that, most people AREN'T leading glorious and enviable lives, and having your McDonalds purchases visible by default simply makes Venmo users look silly. Since most people do NOT like to look silly.....

Zelle also has provides NO protections for senders or receivers. I got a payment to my cell phone # by mistake and was contacted by the sender. I told the sender that I wanted to return their money but I had no way to verify the person calling was the sender, so I asked her to call her bank or Zelle to reverse the payment. A few days later they called me back and said they would file charges of theft if I didn't return the money in 24 hours. I called my bank and Zelle support and was told there was nothing I could do. The sender's bank is the only one that has the information to reverse the payment but they don't have to do this for their customers. This is used by bad people to scam people out of their money! Do not use these services...

I have used Quicken as my "checkbook" for several years. And I use Quicken Bill Pay for most of the bills and regular accounts (like the electric company) that I have. I have *never* had any problems with this setup. Yes, you have to pay for Quicken, but that's just once (plus an occasional required update). But I have been using computers in many ways for more than 30 years, and my handwriting has been taken over by the keyboard. I.e, I'm glad that I rarely have to actually create a handwritten check!

Google Pay is incredibly easy to use and quick. I've tried most of the others but Google's service outperforms all.

Jay Gerard, don’t get suckered into buying Intuit’s “required” updates for Quicken. I’ve been using Quicken99 since, you guessed it, 1999, and it’s been working perfectly well to track all of my accounts. My bank’s bill-pay service has also been flawless, and free. There’s no need to pay Quicken another dime.

Um, I use a credit card. I know I'm like a dinosaur, but it seems easy enough for me.

I am a fan of Square for receiving payments from trusted clients. The record turnaround time from emailing an invoice to cash in my bank account is 46 seconds!

I've used Paypal since at least 2000. I like its Buyer Protection when dealing with strangers. I've also been shielded from scammers when I sold things that were falsely reported as "not delivered" or "not as described."

I use Venmo only to pay my landlord. Haven't checked to see if his rental business - all of which violates local zoning laws - is "on the street."

It's been ten years since I bought paper checks. They ran out three years ago. On the rare occasion I need one, I get a laser-printed sheet of four "temporary" checks at my credit union branch in about one minute.

I pay almost all my bills via my Premier America credit union's free Billpay service. On rare occasions I also use Paypal. And if I have to transfer money to someone I can use the credit union's free PopMoney service. Although I almost never have to write a check, I have to admit that I am starting to run low on blank checks; I only have enough to last another 2 or 3 years. (Thank you, David Hakala, for the suggestion of getting laser-printed temporary checks from my credit union. That would constitute about a 6 month supply.)

As far as Quicken is concerned, I got fed up with having to buy updates every 3 years when I'm perfectly satisfied with the existing features (I now have Quicken 2013). The only reason I felt pressured into buying updates was to be able to download my credit card purchases from my bank (Citi) instead of manually entering each one. But I came up with an adequate work-around:

I export the month's credit card charges from my bank's web site in QIF format, which is easy and only takes seconds, and which downloads to my computer. Then in Quicken I do a File Import of that QIF file. However, Quicken blocks the import of that data directly into a banking or credit card account, by refusing to support automatic downloads in older Quicken versions. Instead I created a "Liability" account, in the same category as a mortgage account, and I import the QIF file into that account; Quicken lets you get away with that. Then I highlight all of the items in that liability account, right-click the mouse, and select "Move Transactions". I select the bank account that I wanted the data downloaded to in the first place, and everything gets moved there. Sure it takes a few extra mouse clicks, but the whole process can be done in less than a minute, and it sure beats manually entering a hundred items each month. And it sure beats paying $40 or $50 bucks every three years for a new version of Quicken filled with new features that I have no interest in.

Thanks greatly for this critical and important information, Bob.

I had been contemplating methods such as this for payment to send / receive for a while now. This has certainly provided some necessary pre-understanding towards utilising such sources of money transfer.

This is good! Keep up the excellent articles!

Dorian

I`ve been using Paypal for over a decade with superior service. No problems with purchases and their resolution department has always been prompt and fair. Can`t comment from a sellers POV as I don`t sell. Yet.

My tenants started by paying me with Chase QuickPay - which became ClearXchange - which has also now gone out of business, with Chase recommending Zelle as the alternative. I looked them up and found reviews that made me very wary - this, combined with the fact that unless your bank also uses them (mine did not at the time), all transactions have to be done by cell phone app - unless this has changed, there is no direct web interface to that service. Not good enough: believe it or not, not every single person does have a smartphone. I suggested PayPal (not Venmo) and that has worked for us with no problems so far.

Thanks Marge T. and Greg for your posts. Will research G-Pay. And my bank offers Zelle. So NO to Zelle. NO to Venmo. Last week i offered to help pay for funeral flowers. My sister-in-law doesn't use P-Pal. Thanks for this article, Bob.

Peer-to-peer? There is nothing "peer-to-peer" about any of these payment services. These are actually "fifth" party services (you, your bank, the payee, the payee's bank, and the P2P interceptors ). The closet thing to a peer-to-peer payment method is actual through your own bank's bill pay service (which is free). I haven't checked, but it's only a matter of time until someone complains about being hacked because of using a P2P service, a service to which both parties give their financial data and then use the most insecure method (cell phone over wifi) for transacting money. What could go wrong?

Paypal is not my pal. I used for paying someone for work done in another country, and that transaction worked perfectly. The next transaction was someone thieving Paypal from my account. Paypal caught it. Then another thief, and I wanted to be out of Paypal. They have never closed my account, wanted more personal information to close the account than I had used to open it. So I called the credit card company who cancelled the card number I had given to Paypal, and in two days mailed me a new card with a new number. So the Paypal account has a dead credit card number and still will not let me cancel, and sends me e-mails about terms and conditions. I will keep writing checks instead.