Electronic Payments

[BottleRocket 659]

I have a new tenant for a rent house that wants to pay her rent electronically . We’ve always taken checks. Is there an app or something like PayPal that doesn’t involve a transaction fee?

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,725]

If the tenant wants to pay using a credit card there will almost certainty be a fee unless you can find a financial startup that is willing to eat the cost. If the tenant is paying with via their bank acct, there shouldn’t be a fee  

Is your tenant want to avoid writing a check, get points or both?

[Bone3421 716]

If its only one property you could set up an automatic payment with her thru her bank...thats how ex and i paid most bills just had a automatic set payment taken out of acct and sent to companies acct

[Bone3421 716]

Assumming you have a business/rent acct separate from personal...

[Tyrone biggums 38]

Venmo

[Apep 645]

Your bank may offer a Venmo competitor.

[Deej 77,806]

Chase let's me take payments through Zelle. If both your banks work with it, they can make payments, and you can take payments, from the app or online.

[dcbc 14,644]

Tell her to send it paypal gift.  As was mentioned above, if it's a direct bank account debit, there's no fee.  If she wants to use a credit card, she can pay the fee.

[BottleRocket 659]

1 hour ago, Bone3421 said:

Assumming you have a business/rent acct separate from personal...

The rent house is in a LLC with other investments. The bank account is with Wells Fargo. I’m assuming she’s going for points but it could be the convenience.  If it is just convenience she could set up a auto bill pay through her bank.  Checks are becoming a thing of the past, but we aren't just going to eat a transaction fee.

Edited June 22, 2018 by BottleRocket

[SDG 3,336]

I had a tenant like that. I just added an account and gave her the info so she could transfer the payment each month. Now with Zelle and others it’s even easier.  

[Bone3421 716]

The rent house is in a LLC with other investments. The bank account is with Wells Fargo. I’m assuming she’s going for points but it could be the convenience.  If it is just convenience she could set up a auto bill pay through her bank.  Checks are becoming a thing of the past, but we aren't just going to eat a transaction fee.

Yeah if its seperate and safe you can just get with her and her bank and give them routing and account info and its done...you will just need to check on the day its due to make sure $$$ is in her account

[zork 629]

8 hours ago, Deej said:

Chase let's me take payments through Zelle. If both your banks work with it, they can make payments, and you can take payments, from the app or online.

This is what my renters use, mostly.

[BottleRocket 659]

Zelle looks like a good option. Thanks guys!

[Guest Lobo]

If you deposit $10,000+ at my bank (either personal or business), we'll eat the costs of the transaction for the first year.  

[zork 629]

6 hours ago, BottleRocket said:

Zelle looks like a good option. Thanks guys!

one negative about Zelle is I have a renter who can't make the full rent payment due to restrictions on his/her account for the amount he wants to send.  so he has to make two zelle payments stretched over 2 days.  it is probably a factor of the average daily balance, or something.  still, overall, a good and free service.

[utbone04 15]

I've been using Google Wallet (now Google Pay) for years now with no fees or restrictions.

[torre 1,298]

Saw this article today.    Need to check privacy rules when selecting an electronic payment vendor.

 

 

Venmo, the mobile payments app, won't say why it exposes users' data to the world whenever they make a transaction.

 

In case you missed it, Hang Do Thi Duc, a Berlin-based privacy researcher found that every time someone sent or received money using the PayPal-owned mobile app (which had over seven million users in 2017), the transaction was "public" by default and was broadcast on Venmo's API.

In other words, everyone can see your transactions -- even without the app.

Whether it's that $22 you sent one friend for splitting the cab ride home, or $300 from your parents because your health insurance is crap and you can't afford a doctor's appointment, it's all there.

"I used Venmo's public API to pull in all public transactions of 2017 -- a total of 207,984,218 transactions," he said in an email. "By looking through them, I learned a scary amount about Venmo users. I was able to follow a drug dealer's sales, watch a couple fight viciously on Valentine's Day, and learn exactly how many mangos a Santa Barbara, CA food cart sells each week."

"I visualize all this data to make it clear just how public our Venmo transactions are -- and what they say about us," said Do Thi Duc.

But one Twitter user went further, creating a bot which scraped public Venmo data and tweeted about potentially illegal drug deals on the platform. At the time of writing, though, this account's tweets had been deleted.

We asked Venmo on Thursday why transactions are public by default, and if Venmo will change this policy in the near future, following up from other reporters who asked the same question but received no response by our deadline.

The company did, however, send out a blanket statement earlier this week, about how it takes the "safety and privacy" of its users seriously.

Except, it doesn't. If Venmo cared, it wouldn't set the default privacy settings to "public."

 

Later on Friday, a Venmo spokesperson said that the app's newsfeed "allows you to see what others have chosen to share on Venmo and the experiences that are happening on Venmo."

"It is very clear in each payment what audience it is being shared with and we have made this even more prominent in recent years," the spokesperson said.

The company did not say why the data was available outside of the app -- let alone able to be scraped by anyone.

There is no good reason why the data is shared by default in the first place.

PayPal, by comparison, which has its own mobile sharing app and owns Venmo, doesn't share transaction details by default and keeps what a person sends and receives private. And as Jake Beckman pointed out in a tweet, Venmo actively warns users when they opt out of the "public" by default privacy with a pop-up message asking if they are sure.

Beckman called that "some serious bulls**t."

Venmo updated its apps Thursday, including "better privacy explanations." The company also updated its privacy guide late Thursday, noting that purchases from approved merchants are private by default. You can change your privacy settings by going to the app or website, going to Settings, then Privacy, and changing the setting to "private." You can also hide past transactions through the menu settings.

 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/venmo-refuses-to-say-why-transactions-are-public-by-default/

[CooterBrown 18,287]

Venmo doesn’t show the amount, just who you sent money to and a comment if you enter one. You can always opt out of displaying it easily. I sent my neighbor $50 yesterday and his mom like my comment that it was for “a 5-gallon bucket of lube”.

[midtown 3,354]

Most of the major banks are using Zelle.