penny-wise

Don’t Be Penny Wise and Pound Foolish with YOUR Money!

With the fiasco that was epass and the millions they stole from countless webmasters, it is understandable that people are hesitant to work with another online payment solution but the truth of the matter is, that can be very short sighted of you.  Of course you always want to be careful and you always want to work to protect yourself but don’t just turn away from what could be saving you a lot of money.

Today we are going to take a look at the newest solution which is called Red Pass.  Red Pass is directed associated with the billing company Zombaio who over the last two years has gained popularity for their ease of use, easier methods of setup (compared to say ccbill and epoch), NATs compatibility and competitive process pricing.  When I setup my Zombaio account I didn’t have to pay the $750 fees that CCBILL and Epoch wanted me to pay and my processing fees are 1% cheaper.  1% may not seem like much but it really can add up over time and the more money I make with them, the less they charge me.  If I was really making major bucks in processing a ton of transactions, my fees could be as low as 4.9%.

Red Pass first came to my attention when they were a major sponsor of the XBIZ 2012 awards show last January.

Their sales pitch for it was rather interesting and did catch my attention.

RedPass offers an easy, convenient, secure and inexpensive way to pay your affiliates, models, contractors or employees. With a RedPass Business account you are able to open RedPass accounts for your payees and instantly send payments. The transfers are made in real time and the funds are available on the payee account immediately.  RedPass is owned by the same financial institution as Zombaio and the integration and transaction flow between the parties is seamless.

The when I went to their website the first thing I noticed was that to get a Mastercard to use with my Red Pass account would cost me $44.95 a year and for that reason alone I honestly just stopped looking into them.  My thought was, I’m not paying some company $45 a year to let me have access to MY money.

But that was very short sighted of me and I didn’t realize it until my sister began bitching one day about how much banks charge you for an incoming wire.

When I make money with my Zombaio billing account they charge me $3.50 to process that payment (send me my money via US Domestic ACH Transfer).  My bank charges me an additional $10 for this.  I chose to get paid once per month from Zombaio so that means that in a year I spent $162 to get MY money and that’s only if I get paid just once per month.  If I increase the number of times I get paid (say weekly) then that $162 suddenly skyrockets to about $700 a year!

 Yes I just said that it cost me over $700 a year just to get paid!

Now keep in mind *MY* bank charges me $10 per transaction, your bank may charge a different amount.  My sisters bank only charges her $5 per transaction so in her case it would only cost her about $350 a year if she wanted to get paid weekly.  I’ve heard some banks charging fees of $11 all the way up to $25.  You’ll need to check with your bank to find out what those automated incoming payments are costing you.

So moving on …. now that you know how much it cost you just get collect YOUR money, that $44.95 a year didn’t suddenly look so bad so I decided to look into this whole Red Pass thing a little more closely.

Since I’ve used Zombaio, (their billing company) for the past two years without any trouble, I figured the trust issue was a non issue, at least in the big sense.  Obviously I would still keep a close eye on things so that I too won’t fall victim to another scam like so many did before me with companies like ePass and iBill of years ago.  I actually was taken by those pieces of shit years ago. -sigh-  But that’s a story for another day.

Basic math tells me that it’s cheaper to pay a $44.95 a year to Mastercard for use of their Red Pass pre-paid MasterCard than to pay my $162 a year in bank related fees to get my money sent directly to me.  The only problem was that would be the only way I would have access to my money is on a MasterCard debit card.  Then I started thinking … while I could ATM out up to $300 a day (for a fee of $3 per transaction) if I had a cash emergency, I didn’t really need to do that.  The money I currently get from Zombaio I use to pay bills like NATs and Elevated X and my Internet bill – a companies who accept MasterCard as a payment method and there is no fees involved in those kind of transactions.

Suddenly I realized, it made way more sense for me to make the switch to Red Pass and now every time I make as little as $100 Zombaio transfers that money to my Red Pass account and that costs me only 25 cents to load that money to my MasterCard.  So now when I need to pay a bill I just use that MasterCard and I save all that money in bank fees.  I also get paid more often which is also nice.

NOW A VERY VERY VERY IMPORTANT WORD OF WARNING.  Where all those people from ePass got screwed was they kept thousands of dollars in their “ewallet”.  These kinds of accounts are typically without of the realm of government control and protection.  So my advice is, no matter how great your working relationship may be with your biller, it’s always better to be safe than sorry so if you get a big batch of money coming in that you don’t want to risk losing forever, load it on your mastercard account and let it sit there instead of in your ewallet.

 

 

 

Don’t Be Penny Wise and Pound Foolish with YOUR Money!