Trust your Money with Netspend

I have written about Netspend before but after trusting them with my money for almost two years now I want to give you an update. I still love this service. This won’t be a long article, but I’m going to outline my five favorite things about using Netspend.

Number Five: Referrals

Each time you refer a new user to Netspend, you get $5 in your account and so do they. It’s not much, but a fun little promotional touch – especially for those who still don’t quite trust their money on the internet.

Number Four: Choice of Fee Plans

No, you don’t have to pay money to use Netspend, but certain fees apply if you use your card. To avoid this, you pay $9.95 a month to avoid fees when you use your card as a debit or credit card. This might seem annoying, but if you read number one, you’ll see why my $10 a month is totally worth it. You can also choose to pay $69.95 for the whole year. Or you could pay nothing and just pay regular fees for certain transactions. I’ve never regretted paying a small fee for this great service.

Number Three: Instant Balance Update

Netspend is completely mobile – from their website to text messages letting you know whenever your balance changes. If you want to check your balance you send a quick text message and within seconds you know how much money you have. But the real bonus is that you can choose to have a text message sent to you each time a transaction is processed. This means that I can see right away if strange things are going on and I always know how much money I have.

Number Two: Money as Soon as you Need it

This reason is really two in one. First, Netspend is extremely compatible with PayPal. Instead of waiting days to transfer money from my PayPal account to my Netspend account, it takes hours – tops. Usually it’s virtually instant. I have a PayPal debit card, but I rarely use it anymore because the money can be transferred to my – supersafe – Netspend account superfast.

The second part of this is that Netspend is constantly releasing new features. My favorite new feature is the instant new debit number. If your card is lost, stolen or highjacked, you can cancel it and Netspend will immediately issue you new – virtual – account information that you can use online or over the phone to purchase things or pay bills. While you are waiting for your new card to arrive, you won’t be left hanging.

Number One: Customer Service and Protection

I am constantly signing up for random membership sites so I can review them for this blog. This means that my card details have occassionally been stolen. Last year, some lovely porn addict signed me up for several porn sites. Because I get text messages whenever money goes in or comes out of my account, I knew within seconds that I had paid $49.95 to a company name I’d never heard of. This wasn’t odd because of all the membership sites I join, but what was odd was that when I looked up the company online it turned out that they owned websites with – albeit funny – clearly porn-related URLs.

I called Netspend and let them know I was going to try to get the subscriptions cancelled. I talked quickly to a real person who understood the problem and they said that if I called the company who’d charged me they might remove the charge. The customer service rep said that if the company wouldn’t cancel it, they’d step in and help and also put my card number on a porn blacklist. The company ended up cancelling the charges and Netspend did indeed add my details to a blacklist. And that was the end of that problem.

Netspend has a ton of other great features from graphs to show you where you are spending your money to excellent customer service across the board. I haven’t included my affiliate ID in this article because I want to be clear that I really just love this service and am not looking for referrals. I hope you’ll check it out and enjoy it as much as I do.