PayPal owns Venmo. They are the fax machine of personal payment options. They used to be state of the art. Like a fax machine, they both still work, but…
SquareCash or Zelle are faster and less expensive ways to send money.
With SquareCash or Zelle, you can send or request cash. The money goes from the sender’s bank account to the receiver’s bank account in minutes. Your money doesn’t hang out in a 3rd party app.
With PayPal and Venmo, the money received sits in the PayPal or Venmo account until one signs in to their app and tells it to move the money to an external bank account. The moving of the money takes at least one day with PayPal and up to three business days with Venmo.
PayPal and Venmo will put your money in your bank account instantly – but they charge you 25 cents per transaction for that honor.
If you want to try out SquareCash, sign up with this link. Then if you send $5 to someone, you and I will both get $10. Not too shabby.
What’s cool about Zelle is that you may already have it in your bank’s app. So there’s no need to go through a 3rd party app. Click here to see if your bank or credit union is already hooked up with Zelle. By my count there are 169 different banks! Read all about Zelle, if’n you wanna.
In the past week, I paid my plumber with Zelle from inside my Wells Fargo app. Two of my tenants paid me rent with Zelle. I did some bookkeeping. One guy paid with Zelle and the other PayPal. By the time the PayPal money hit my bank account I’d forgotten momentarily what it was for.
If enough people give the shiv to PayPal and Venmo, they will probably get rid of that two-bit charge.
So sign up with SquareCash and see if you already have Zelle!
