@Realist wrote:
@IsambardPrince wrote:
@Realist wrote:
Do we really need another one? Loved how with PayPal they could lock up your money whenever they felt like it.
Don't put money you can't afford to lose in these things.
Anyway, I was going to mention this "partnership" and how it's seriously made my consider canceling all my Visa credit cards.
I have plenty of Mastercards, Discover cards, and AmEx cards in my wallet and it's just gotten ridiculous. Pruning ones that run on Visa's network would easily clear out half the cards.
Paypal was pretty unhinged back in the day, so many people learned to only send enough funds for the transaction alone because of it. No one would dare keep money in the Paypal account. Back then I use to use it for business transactions only. Racked up many hundreds of "I'm verified" positives (pertaining to positive feedback transactions) along the way, back when that was actually a thing and mattered to showcase some level of trust online. You can imagine how long ago that was.
Today, I might use it to auto pay on a online video subscription like hulu or netflix or whatever. Times have changed.
There was a kid, like 16 or 17, a while back, who called Dave Ramsey and said he had some sort of gig that let him save like $300,000 or something, which is a stupid large amount of money at that age (stupid large amount of savings by most adult standards too because they won't quit buying so much darned stuff), but he was keeping it in a PayPal account and not even earning interest on it.
Dave's advice should have been get it into an FDIC regulated bank, a couple of banks actually so you get insurance on the whole amount, and EARN EARN EARN in a MMSA or something. I'd say Treasuries but with everything going on in the federal government these days, who knows?
It's true that Treasuries are backed by the Full Faith and Credit of the US government, but I had a lot more faith in that before that meant Elon Musk's people who have burrowed into the Treasury department.
At least the FDIC for now seems more independent and actually has money in the Deposit Insurance Fund. Not enough to cover everything if it all went at once, but enough to cover "how bad things are likely to get".
The stock market is going to go belly up. These tariffs and trade barriers are not going to go over well when they are undermining USMCA and are going to send all three economies into reverse.
PayPal still is sketchy, even with Elon gone for many years. They froze my Venmo account and wouldn't unfreeze it until I showed them my passport card, and then PayPal itself was apparently freezing people's accounts over the last four years (which were bad in their own way, but not this bad) over political speech the government didn't like. And they'll do it again, probably, but to different people.
I would never ever keep $300,000 in there like that kid did, for so many reasons. And that Ramsey didn't tell him get a real bank and make some interest, well. He said go talk to your pastor and then huddle together with mom. What's to say pastor and mom have a good head for finance?
There was an episode of Sliders back in the day where everything in the world was impossibly cheap, and it turned out that they got together and kept their population under control, no wars broke out all the time, and it kept things cheap.
We're in the opposite of this. Trade wars and "war wars" breaking out everywhere. We're in inflation world. And when you're not even earning an easy 4%, you're getting your butt kicked.
