Cash The Checks

If they pay so much, why am I not going to throw some money into my Paypal account and keep it there?

First, Paypal has a history of “freezing” accounts for no reason. Back in 2001, I had an account frozen and all of my funds were frozen as well. I couldn’t withdraw my money or accept any either. They asked me to send them information about me. It’s been so long I forgot what they wanted, but probably a copy of my state issued drivers liscene and a copy of a credit card, and most likely a copy of a current utility bill. I sent in everything and I never did get that account re-opened.

If you think this was a fluke case, then take a look at Paypal Sucks. It’s happened to lots of other people too. I think Paypal has cleaned up its’ act after being sued, so I doubt anything like that would ever happen again. eBay owns it now too so that’s given me enough confidence to keep using Paypal under a new account I created soon after my first one was closed. Just how confident am I in Paypal? Well I use it to pay for my eBay purchases and receive money from my eBay sales, but as soon as I have money in there, it goes right back to my bank account.
Just a couple of months ago, I “accidently” left a few hundred dollars in my account.. I was surprised to see it earned interest, as I had forgotten Paypal offered that. I think it was 5.05% APY. Not too shabby, but not FDIC-insured, so “save” at your own risk.

The end of the year is quickly approaching and for those of us who have a business and make business expenses, it’s a good time to make some calculations and see how much you’re going to pay Uncle Sam this year. The advantage of doing this now is that if your tax liability is too high, it’s a perfect time to make some extra business expenses before the year is through.

Here’s a few things you can do to increase your business expenses yet not spend foolishlly.

• If you’ve been wanting to upgrade your computer, there’s no better time than now.
• Pre-pay your advertising expenses for the next few weeks/months in advance.
• If there’s this business investment you’ve been hesitant to make, this could be the extra motivation you need to take the risk.

Alright well I sold all my stocks and cashed out. After the insane fees I was charged, I was only left with just over 8 bucks. I figured my life is better off with $8 than without it. This should be their new ad.. I hate the fine print!

I like their high interest rate. But they don’t update how much money you’re making until the end of the period, every month. With ING, you can log in every single day and see your interest grow day in day out.

The HSBC website also looks like it was built years ago by a beginner in web design. There’s also many features but it’s complicated and ING’s site is much easier to navigate and the sign-up process is much better.

Ultimately what it all boils down to is the money, so I’ll stick with HSBC for the high rates, for now at least.

About a year ago, I wanted to get into the stock market so I opened up a ShareBuilder account. I had no idea what I was doing and still to this day, I still have no clue. I bought $20 worth of stock in Google and $20 in Target as an experiment. I was going to track the progress and then just cash-out. If I ever found it real interesting, I’d invest more money in more stocks and become more active in it.

Here’s what my account looks like after a year and a $40 initial investment

There’s a whopping $40.85 in it. Okay so the experiment is over, I don’t have enough time to keep track of my stocks, and it was a valuable expierience. So it’s time to cash out or withdraw my money…

Whoops, here’s the catch. I can only cash out that $0.10 that was paid to me in “dividends”. I have to “sell” my stocks first. Okay so let me go and sell my stock. I go to sell my $17+ in Target stock and there’s a $15.95 fee to do this! I go to sell my Google stock and there’s antoher $15.95 fee! So by my calculations if I want my $40.85 in my account, I need to pay ShareBuilder $30.90 first, leaving me with only $8.95.

So here are my options at this point..

• leave the $40.85 in my account.
• sell the stocks and withdraw what’s left - $8.95

One option leaves me with nothing in my pocket, the other with $8.95. However with the first option, I don’t give Share Builder the satisfaction of getting $30.90 from me.

What to do, what to do..

Filling out the application at HSBC was simple enough, just put in your information and you’re done. It isn’t that easy to open an account and begin earning interest though.

After joining, my application still wasn’t complete because I needed to prove that the address I entered was my real address. So I had to mail in some form of proof. Any utility bill would do, so I mailed in a copy of my DSL bill which showed my current address. This just cost me some printer ink, paper, an envelope, a $0.39 stamp and of course my time to get the paperwork and get it off to the post office. I also had to confirm my bank account information by verifying a small deposit HSBC made to my account.
Within just 2 days of mailing my information, I received a notification that they received it and my application was approved. I thought it was over but it was only the beginning. Next I needed a customer ID number, a username and a password, an ATM card and a pin number. All of which needed to be mailed to me, in SEPARATE mailings! As you can imagine this took quite a while. I did get one mailing per day on average though.

After getting my information, I finally was able to log in to my account at HSBC. I wanted to transfer some money into my HSBC account, this is what they call a “Bank To Bank Transfer”. I put in my bank information and I also needed to type in my ATM pin number. The problem was that I didn’t have one. So I called HSBC to ask them for one, and they said they’d mail it to me, big surprise. A day later I had the mailing and was able to complete my bank to bank transfer request. When that was done, I transferred some funds into my HSBC account from my checking account and the process was finally over.

I finally decided to give HSBC a try because of their much higher APY rate. Currently it’s at 5.05% which is much higher than ING’s 4.35% APY. After the Feds raised interest rates, ING only went up slightly while HSBC raised their rates significantly. This one move was the biggest factor that led to me opening an HSBC account. In the next post I’ll detail the HSBC sign-up process and how it all turned out for me.

So I heard about this place called Prosper.com, they call themselves “The online marketplace for people-to-people lending.” It sounds interesting but I was amazed at just how good their service is. I’m not interested in borrowing any money but I sure am interested in lending it, since I want to earn a higher interest rate than what Savings Accounts can offer me.

The great thing about this service is that it minimizes the risk of your borrower defaulting on their loan. If you want to lend out $1,000 for example, you could lend out $100 to 10 different people. The borrower pays Prosper.com a monthly fee, and Prosper pays you what you lent out plus interest every month as well.

Each borrower gets a credit rating (A-F) and describes what their loan is for. If I have some more time in the future, I’m going to take a closer look at it and throw some money in there and see how it goes. If the trial run goes welll, I’ll invest a bit more.

For once, I’m going to have my money work for me, instead of me working for the money.