Earn Interest on Your PayPal Balance
Here’s a quick money earning tip… If you’re carrying a balance in your PayPal account, make sure that you’re earning interest… While PayPal offers a ‘Money Market’ account that’s currently paying 4.98%, the default setting is for you to earn no interest whatsoever.
While I wouldn’t use this as a substitute for a bank account due to the lack of FDIC insurance, as well as PayPal’s reputation for freezing accounts first and asking questions later whenever a dispute arises, there’s no reason not to earn a bit of interest on whatever you have lying around in your account. So hop on over to PayPal, log in, and poke around for info on how to upgrade your account.
Published on July 24th, 2006 - 7 Comments
Filed under: Banking, Online
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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Tip It!
July 24th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Actually I’ve heard some pretty scary stories about PayPal customer service regarding their pseudo-bank accounts.. for my take, I’d rather just transfer the money out. You can link your HSBC or ING account to your PayPal account and transfer it back and forth whenever you want.
July 24th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
As an ebay seller, I hate to leave money in my PayPal account for fear of a charge-back. If my account is empty, I have a layer of protection should PayPal decide to raid my account for a charge-back without my having a chance to look into the issue.
October 17th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Is paypals interest just 4.98% or is it APY?
April 19th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Not in the UK! Bastards. (Not that the UK is doing interest on savings, itself, at time of writing!).
May 20th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Paypal sucks horribly. I’ve had my account debited by them numerous times. They will seize funds out of your account on a whim if a customer has nay issue at all. Take the money, ask questions alter.
I NEVER carry a balance, you might find yourself not getting your money back.
If there was an alternative I’d dump Paypal in a second.
March 30th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
‘Earn Interest on Your PayPal Balance’ is a scam.
October 28th, 2011 at 5:31 pm
Thanks for this exciting idea….and I was left frustrated as your “poke around” could’ve actually lead us to the link on the paypal site!