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Paypal Grinds To A Halt
BillBrasky writes "After a 'Monthly Software Update', it appears that PayPal started having problems. There were reports all weekend of troubles, and as of Monday night here, I can't access it at all (connection time out). One user even reported that his PayPal Debit card was getting refused!" A message on the site now says the site is expected to be back at 8:10 PM PDT, not long from now.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Maybe not the smartest place to have put my life savings?
They have to deal with a slashdotting.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6228586/
msnbc also has an article about the outtages
Get out your crystal balls. What effect do you think this will have on the share price of EBAY tomorrow? Will that constitute a buying or selling opportunity?
Yeah, so paypal.com is having issues loading. Makes sense to slashdot them too!
The first six or seven times I tried clicking through to this story slashdot told me "Nothing to see here. Move along." Problem in the subscription code?
Anyway this was bound to happen sooner or later. There's frankly no way to test large-scale use of a resource like that because in order to REALLY test it you have to exchange a lot of data with assorted financial institutions which will probably not be very forgiving about something like that. Paypal's never given me any trouble whatsoever and I think that not being able to use it for a day or so is acceptable. Not being able to access debit card funds could be a serious blow to someone foolish enough to store a lot of money in paypal, but otherwise it should have little impact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...most sites that rely on paypal (donations to stay up) don't really get donations anyways. Hard to bring a non-existant economic action to a halt ;-)
hehe I'm a silly goose.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
This is Karma biting Paypal in the ass. Paypal, thanks for all of the overcharging and fee stacking ... bungholes.
I recieved a message that they were unavailable about 1 this afternoon. I was able to get back in a few minutes ago but it was majorly slow. Glad I didn't need to pay for anything today.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
I just got an email from them asking me to verify my account information and it was working just fine!
The ones that tell me I need to log in to my account because of the possible security problem and the URL is to a server in Korea.
That sucking sound you hear is my bandwidth.
This is just one of their ways of telling people they are not a bank. :)
The next time they get into trouble for not following banking rules they can say
"See, we're not a bank...banks don't crash"
How much negative feedback will be left on ebay due to user stupidity? The world wonders...
Don't you mean 'looks like a bank, acts like a bank, but doesn't bother following proper banking practice' Panic?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
PayPal reports problem. We slashdot them.
I know we hate them and all, but why can't we take just a little bit of sympathy?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Thats funny, I never had problems with my paypal account. I get emails all the time from them asking me to verify my account at secure websites like paypal.reallysecure.tk. Sometimes they even send me a utility, paypalbuddy.exe, to keep my computer secure. I feel a lot safer since I've installed paypalbuddy.exe, in fact I know that I'm safe because if I check my task manager I can see that paypalbuddy.exe is using 90% of my CPU to constantly encrypt my paypal traffic, even when I'm not at the computer! I forwarded this handy utility to my mother-in-law and she loves it too.
The only thing Paypal should really focus on now is training their likely outsourced software engineers in proper grammar. Samir is constantly sending me emails about my paypal account though for some reason he can never get some english phrases right. I guess its ok though, I cant expect the entire world to speak english, and I give him an E for effort, especially on those unique poems he attaches to the end of the emails...
Shall I share...
Capture the magic of the season,
Sit down, relax, and have trust in us.
The price of portability
upon Real Girls Business?
Thou must medicate thyself.
Credit where credit is due, this spam poetry site rocks
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
They're just getting ready to invoke line 4531 of the service agreement (that thing in the 5 line scrollbar you agreed to) which says that if they seize your account and all the money therein you agree to settle your case through binding arbitration via email.
After listening to the talk, one came away wondering how the site even worked at all. Every day, you are on the bleeding edge and every day if you have the slightest of hiccups, expect to have it covered in the Wall Street Journal the next day.
I don't know what they paid that poor guy, but it isn't enough. I'm surprised he still has all his hair and it wasn't grey.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Paypal is used for most Ebay transactions, and according to Dick Cheney, Ebay is what's keeping our economy going. I'd say more, but I need to go to the store for canned food, plastic sheeting, and duct tape.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
for infrastructure services such as PayPal, it is essential that we have competition and choices.
this is a valid use of government regulatory powers: NO MONOPOLIES, EVER
It probably happened because this ebay seller was selling bootleg dvds and the FBI seized Paypal's servers :)
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
By the way, don't trust PayPal's message that the site might be available at any specific time. They've been giving specific times all day today but for the most part, it's inaccessible through any interface... web front-end, payment processing back-end, instant payment notifications, debit cards don't work, etc.
You can read more about the trials and tribulations of this weekend's major outage from a developer's point of view at the PayPal Developer web forum. There are a lot of unhappy campers there!
A service which houses 50 million people, has billions of dollars flow through it, and is the primary payment service for the largest auction site in the world? Sounds pretty newsworthy to me, people.
Regardless, we accept Paypal payments for our business. Didn't work all weekend...and today I kept getting errors (I think it was 30004) telling me to "retry" or "return to main page". Took a few retries, but I did get stuff done....such as transfering money out for payroll on Friday. Auction and storefront sales were down from lack of a payment service though. Debit card had activity over the weekend, so that worked fine.
from the msnbc article:
"When folks go to use their PayPal debit cards, the payment is rejected, but the charge actually goes through and PayPal is deducting the amount from their account"
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
First there's an article about how bad it is to be in IT.
/.'ers.
Then PayPal goes down and it receives national attention followed by an assault on the servers by curious
Yeah... I bet there's at least one IT guy out there who's phone is ringing like made who'd agree being IT really sucks...
This is why real banking institutions have such stringent operational guidelines set down my the federal government in regards to information systems. This should serve as a hearty wake-up call to a great many people that have fallen under the impression that Paypal is a "real" bank, when in fact they are not.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
I'm too lazy to mail a check or money order for something I buy online (online is supposed to = convenient), so when I wanted to buy a lens for my SLR, I didn't bid on the relevant auctions today, since I was not sure I'd have a reliable way to pay for it.
One wonders how much money will be lost by others taking similar actions. Not really quantifiable but definitely some kind of loss.
A friend of mine sent me $35 bucks via paypal, it arrived.. Then the other day I checked my account and it was EMPTY. I have not bought anything with paypal in the last month, so where did my balance go?
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I don't say this lightly as I work in a bank and have to deal with it. The regulation of banks has worked well enough for long enough to migrate the impetus of many regulations away from "safety and soundess" (the two cornerstones of a properly run bank) to consumer protection and antiterrorism.
With the advent of paypal and other non-bank players entering the financial services arena, these entities need to be brought under the same regulations that face banks. Make paypal live and work under Reg E. Make insurance companies deal with CRA issues. Make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac live up to the same standards set forth for other financial institutions.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
1) As soon as someone pays you, move ALL the money out of your PayPal account.
2) To pay someone else, have payment go directly from your associated checking account. There is no need to carry a positive balance on PayPal.
3) Don't get the goddamn DEBIT card.
BTW, it's 8:37PT and it took almost 3 minutes to sign on. My guess is that PayPal will be hiring soon.
Hmmm, I wonder what hardware/software they use, and I wonder why no one's bashing it.
PayPal may occationally screw up, but they don't screw you over consistently like Western Union...
Oh well, what the hell...
Collect $200?
sig not found
Maybe I'll luck out and get the "Superman Bonus" where all the fractions of a cent are placed in my account. You'll know I did if I drive to work tomorrow in a yellow Ferrari :)
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
As soon as I heard ebay had acquired them, I thought "Oh boy, I sure hope ebay doesn't get involved in the technical side of running paypal".
Apparently they have.
I've been trying to pay my tri-monthly hosting bill through PayPal since last night. Whenever it isn't timing out it gives me errors all the way through the process. Only once was I able to get all the way through the process, just to get an error message saying something about their credit card checking ability being down and that I could only pay through a PayPal credit card or something similar that didn't need to run the credit card number. It's far from a 'hiccup'. They have been having problems that I've been dealing with for the last 24 hours at least. I don't know how bad it was before that.
Though a lot of posts on here are along the lines of "see...haha...paypal is not a bank!!" I for one am grateful that it isn't.
There are a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, who have been screwed out of getting a bank account from a regular bank. Because of negative reporting on chex systems, they can't get a regular checking account at all.
In tandem with a savings account (which you *can* sometimes get even with a bad chexsystems report) and a paypal account, you have essentially the same services of a checking account.
I for one got screwed by my bank (5/3rd) after fraud hit my account and they refused to take responsibility for some items. Thanks to paypal I still can have checking account like abilities until I sue my bank.
Paypal has a really neat tie-in with USPS. It's a small handful of clicks from accepting the payment to printing out a shipping label (with postage!). I think it's worth it for a smaller scale business. It's VERY easy to use.
;)
You can use a Paypal debit card to get cash out of your account, although there is a daily limit. Maybe once you surpass that limit you should consider getting your own merchant account though.
PayPal is slow right now, almost as if a gaggle of geeks where checking to see if it realy was down. However, everything seems to be working.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
According to a quick telnet...
I hope that isn't true. That release is 2 years old. As per Apache's web site: "We consider Apache 1.3.31 to be the best version of Apache 1.3 available and we strongly recommend that users of older versions, especially of the 1.1.x and 1.2.x family, upgrade as soon as possible."
See: http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/Announcement.html
In the US, New York State and Louisiana have imposed some regulatory requirements on PayPal.
If you lost money with Paypal between 1999 and 2003, there's a class action settlement.
One of my friends has interviewed at PayPal and Ebay for the SCM and Build Engineer role. Because of the merger, he interviewed with the same technical lead twice.
A famous question is
"How do you remove all of the directories named "TEST" from the repository?"
Understanding best practices, the answer has always been
"Can't we just hide them, version control is there for a reason?"
The head of their team then explained
"No, who would name anything TEST that they wanted to need"
For the record he clarified that the job entails removing versions and files.
Its clear that best practice at Ebay/PayPal is to fly by the seat of your pants and hope it works. We all see how well that works now.
eBay doesn't seem to have learned anything from these debacles, and continues to roll out unnecessary updates with inadequate testing, resulting in previously solid functionality breaking down. Whoever is in charge of update testing over there should be sacked.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I was finally able to send money about 30 minutes ago, but now I have several people sending me money orders I do not want. Bah! I hate Paypal.
That's why people make rollback plans. If I had the budget of paypay I'd have my new sun servers ready, points my VIPs to the new sun servers and if everything goes to hell, go back to the old VIPs and back to the drawing board.
:)
Psh.. amateurs
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
So, you contend that Federal Reserve regulation is effective in preventing server deployment fuck-ups?
They do try.
My last job before the sigified one was managing MIS Operations for a regional community bank. Now, this was during Y2K preparation, so it was somewhat atypical, but there is certainly a lot of FSLIC regulation in place to prevent, as you say, fuck-ups, be they server deployment or darn near anything else.
Now, the bank I worked for was also atypical (top in its class as far as compliance), so I don't know exactly how "effective" it really is industry-wide, but as I say, they *do* try.
On the other hand, if eBay/PayPal is getting socked with Sarbaines-Oxley (which I doubtless just misspelled) requirements, they may well have to jump through the same sort of hoops the FSLIC and FDIC put real banks through. I got out of the bidness altogether before SOx, so I can't speak to that authoritatively.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Yet another reason this unregulated global banking monopoly has to get some competition, immediately. The ecommerce world cannot afford to rely on this single point of failure, either accidentally or at their discretion.
--
make install -not war
For those who say "if its already slow, dont slashdot it!", seems you over estimate the slashdot effect. Slashdot links may take a normal web host down, but anyone with an infrastructure built to serve a lot of traffic shouldn't even notice it.
A site I run has been linked by Slashdot many times - aside from the number of referrals in web logs and perhaps a few mbit spike in traffic, you wouldn't know it even occured.
PayPal is having much larger issues. I've experienced the same types of problems when doing larger upgrades - it's usually a single piece of code that went unchecked, and the odd user(s) that actually get caught in an untested (or improperly tested) segment of code are throwing the system for a loop.
Or, just bad performance planning. I'm not surprised - these things have to happen every now and then, they're quite unavoidable when you're dealing with often changes to an infrastructure with that many _DYNAMIC_ users, and so much _DYNAMIC_ data.
Regardless, it's a growing pain. I've been through a few of these on a 150 GB database with 2 MM users and 15 servers. PayPal is a lot larger, and they surely have much more difficult problems. Hell, if they have to do something such as change the way a single piece of data is stored, that means a lot of downtime (or slowtime) processing!
I'm sure they'll sort it out, unfortunately lots of people are losing lots of business in the process.
Is anyone else profoundly bothered by this?
PayPal, which must deal handle millions of dollars a day, just goes down entirely. My real problem, though, is that they are not a real bank. (At least last time I checked) they are not FDIC Insured or anything. They could just never come back, and there's really not much anyone could do.
Not that I expect them to run off with my money. But in situations such as, say, the whole site going down, I like to know my money's in something that's insured.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
It's not a bank, people!
Others have said similar, I merely divert your attention to http://www.paypalsucks.com/....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My luck never fails me. Today I ran out of clicks, hits, or whatever Slashdot calls there subscription "points". I also ran out on another website I "subscribe" to so I figured kill two birds with one stone.
So what do I do, I re-subscribe through paypal today and I did notice it was going a tad slow, but I didn't worry too much.
To be honest I thought it was a recent FW upgrade on my router I did the night before acting up. I reflashed back a version and everything seemed ok.
Anyways the issue: I was wondering why my subscription to Slashdot still wasn't showing up. My other subscription was paid within the same minute as the slashdot one, and it went through fine. Weird. As of 9:55pm PST it still hasn't "gone through" (BTW I am confident that it will be fixed and I know it's not Slashdot's fault)
After finding out about the problem, I can only wonder if the Slashdot payment will even go through. My real concern is my bank account being screwed up, I don't want to be billed for $5 in an endless loop.
~Your Friendly Neighborhood Anime Man
Went to a Wawa (it's a Philly area convenience store) to buy a sandwich for me and my wife. Total was $11, I have $15 in the account from an eBay auction I sold last week.
Selected debit- transaction denied. Selected debit again- transaction denied. Selected credit- this time it went through. (Otherwise I was just going to pay cash.)
When I checked my account when I got home, the balance was negative- they double-debited the transaction.
Now, I'm not worried- even my bank has made an error or two like this, and a call to customer service tomorrow should clear things up. And even if it doesn't, it's $11.
But I do feel very bad tonight for people depending on the money in that account. They're in a lot of trouble tonight.
Of course, these services are all inferior to PayPal because of the exorbant fees that each charges. Useful in a pinch, but if Paypal disappeared, I would wager that most merchants would choose to set up a merchant account directly with CC companies, and avoid the extra cost. The convenience just isn't worth it.
....I guess installing SP2 for WinXP was a mistake after all!
PGA
I think this sort of problem was one of the major issues in the class-action lawsuit that PayPal is in the process of settling now (it was litigated this summer).
I'm not sure if your problems were in the right timeframe, but this probably applies to *someone* reading this.
Check here to see if it applies to you.
This morning I withdrew my $4.81 so I could get a pack of smokes and a cup-o-noodle.
Guess they were depending on me to pay their internet bill!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
It says "Your information is kept secure." In fact, they keep it so secure, you can't even access it yourself.
Here's the secret to immortality:
If you use their money market account option, your money isn't insured... but if you just have a regular PayPal balance, it actually is FDIC insured... in a way. Basically, they keep your money in a pooled account in a real bank, and you get "pass-through" FDIC insurance because of that, up to $100K.
They explain this in detail in a link off the homepage.
It's not as good as putting your money in a bank (because your protection in case of PayPal's insolvency doesn't seem totally assured, just in the case of the *bank's* insolvency), but it's not totally unprotected.
if you blow your credit _really_ badly (ex., if you're a man and you divorice a woman), you're probably screwed for the next 10 years. So much so that you get stuck with services like paypal for a debit/credit card. What paypal's doing (and what they've always done) is take advange of people who aren't in a position to use a normal, legitimate business. This is why they get away with the shit they do. If you're using paypay, you probably don't have a heck of a lot of (better) alternatives.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I just read the "Jobs at PayPal" page... Some of the more interesting new openings that have been updated today:
:)
Director, Software Infrastructure Architecture
Senior Software QA Engineer
Staff Software Engineer
Sounds to me like they're cleaning house after this one
bash: rtfm: command not found
I heard a news item the other day on the radio that banks all around the country are about to begin using a new system for verification of checks and that customers could no longer count on 'floating' of check for two or three days. I'd be willing to bet PayPal was upgrading their software to support this. It's estimated this change will put $2 billion more into the banking industry each year, largely in the form of fees on bounced checks and overdraft charges. There may be more such failures in the next few weeks.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
I feel a lot safer since I've installed paypalbuddy.exe, in fact I know that I'm safe because if I check my task manager I can see that paypalbuddy.exe is using 90% of my CPU to constantly encrypt my paypal traffic, even when I'm not at the computer! I forwarded this handy utility to my mother-in-law and she loves it too.
Interesting. I also forwarded to my mother-in-law, although I did not install it locally...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
That when I tried to withdrawl funds from my paypal into my bank account, I couldn't change the drop down box that lets you choose which account you want to put the funds in. It always reverted to the default no matter what. I had to change my default account # to make the transfer. Hopefully this will also be addressed. I'm just glad I'm not alone in my paypal troubles. /. is the greatest for making me feel better in my misery.
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
Read all about it here
The site that scared me enough to take all my money out of paypal and never use it again. They're not a real bank and they're not held up to the same standard as real banks. Just read some of the horror stories in their forums.
--Smutt
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
The "user systems" and associated features of these bank sites have nowheres near the relational properties of something like PayPal - it's not even close. They can segregate data based on customer sets, where you know where users are coming from, and you can tie them to their own set of data - data that can be archived and summarized into non-realtime aggregates.
PayPal has the task of linking transactions between users, and allowing users to create modifications or additions to them in real time.
These are not the same, by any stretch. It's the final bit of difference that makes it so much more complex.
You see, PayPal sucks and all that (what with them freezing accounts all over the place), but what are the alternatives?
Really. For an individual or small business, you don't want high setup or monthly fees, and if you look in that league, who can beat PayPal in terms of transaction fees and ease of use?
I'd genuinly like to know.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Paypal isn't exactly known as the most reliable company. But are there any better alternatives out there, that have a good reputation? Are there any similar companies that also accept money from Asia countries (such as Malaysia and Phillippines), and don't charge $30 to transfer to an international bank account (I live in Europe, not US)?
1) You should always have a detailed rollback plan. This should include what you monitor during the change, what triggers the rollback and who is responsible for making that decision
2) You should have a rollback plan for any change to a live site which deals with transactions no matter how 'small' the site is
The problem these days is the complex interaction between different systems and user traffic means there is no guarantee of a flawless rollout even with a full staging system to test on. I have seen failures occuring due to a unique combination of user requests creating a thread contention which results in an instability causing failure up to 1/2 an hour later!
There is a gap for a system which can capture the entire network traffic being applied to a system and replay it against a staging environment to catch just this sort of problem.
The other problem is a 'minor' problem during rollout such as intermittant failure of some parts. This is let go for a while and people start throwing hacks at the problem. Before you know it enought new transactions have been applied to the system to make rollback unviable.
In my opinion with complex web based systems testing and rollout is becoming one of the most interesting areas in IT at the moment
Paypal recently relocated their stuff to Omaha, Nebraska. Why Omaha? Something like 60% of all VISA/MC transactions pass through First Data's bunker at 72nd and Pacific and a good portion of the other 40% goes through First National Bank's facilities downtown.
A fellow who used to work for me spent less than three months at Paypal as a Windows server admin. I forget the exact details but he said they wanted him to complete something like thirty projects a quarter and his impression was that eight projects of the sort they were asking would be a reasonable schedule.
I have heard that Paypal is pretty much a madhouse. Omaha isn't big enough to have a huge pool of IT talent and if they're grinding people into the dirt word will get around quickly. I predict you'll see lots of monster.com job posts for them as they poison their reputation here.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
This is the "Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act", commonly known as "Check 21". Basically it allows a bank anywhere along the path from where the check is first deposited, to its arrival for payment at your bank, to replace the paper check with a front and back image scan. The law provides that your copy of this substituted check must be treated like an original check for the purpose of things like using it as a receipt to show you paid. For example, if your landlord failed to record the fact that you paid the rent, but deposited your check anyway, the law requires this substitute check image (printed back to you by your bank) be accepted as proof the check was deposited just as the original would be.
Banks are not required to do the image scan of checks, but they are allowed to do so. Banks are required to accept the image scan in place of those checks when the image scan gets done. If PayPal is allowing you to write checks against your account (but they would BE a bank if this happens, I'd think), they would have to update their software by October 28 to comply. More likely, if "Check 21" is an issue here, is that they may be adding some software to allow them to image scan checks made as payment to them. But the more they do like this, the closer they become to being a real bank.
When an image scan is done, the check can be processed much faster because it can now be sent to the account holder bank electronically. This is where the "float" many people depend on can start to disappear. OTOH, your bank may be able to get funds into your account for checks paid to you that you deposit equally faster. There is a possibility that PayPal was doing things that depend on the "float". Many business and people have been doing that for years. Practices will now have to change.
For more information:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I called paypal customer service last week complaining about the REALLY poor performance of the site. The wonderfully helpful DOLT on the other end said that the site gets really busy during the weekend and that slows things down.
Bullsh*t.
How can Ebay build a site that handles millions of transactions, and has great uptime and speed, yet their subsidiary - suck so bad?
-ted
I'm sorry to have to admit that this is all my fault. After having a paypal account for 3 years, I finally *received* a payment for the first time over the weekend.
:-\
You can obviously see the result. I only regret that my karma had to affect the rest of you
1. write ultra-scalable jsp application
2. It is too slow. Add a separate database server.
3. Still to slow. Add several http web application servers.
4. Add synchronization talk between web application servers to make sure no two different servers talk to one customer.
5. Add synchronization talk between database servers to make sure they all use the same database.
6. Release to public.
7. Something doesn't work. Switch on debug output and logging to full level.
8. Watch as all servers talk to each other over the underdimensioned intranet connections:
"Hey buddy, I feel so bad, so much load could you do this for me?"
"I'm sorry I've got too much work myself, but here, have some debug output."
9. Watch the intrusion detection system randomly switch off nodes because they showed unnormal traffic patterns.
10. get mentioned on slashdot. There's no such thing as bad publicity!
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
So is it cloudy or something? Why would they go to solar power?
Bankruptcy is pretty much a complete joke in the US. I filed back in the spring of 98. By the end of the summer, I had credit cards again; the interest rates on both were around 18%. The credit limits were small - around $300 - but within 2 years I had ones with $2,000 limits. Around 2000, I bought a new car and zero problem getting financing. I was afraid I was going to get totally screwed on the interest rate, I ended up getting like 6%. The following year I bought a house and, again, had no trouble getting the loan. The bankruptcy wasn't even an issue. I don't remember the interest rate on that, but it wasn't very high -- something like 5% on a 30 year with no money down. Granted, my mortgage was a VA loan, but that in way guarantees that the lender will give you a loan, it just guarantees that they will get a (small) portion back if you default. Last year I bought a new car and again got financing with no problems, this time with a rate of about 4%. So far, the only problem my bankruptcy has caused me is that Best Buy wouldn't give me a credit card when I applied for one a year ago.
Oh --- debit cards don't help you credit score. Neither does pushing the "credit" button rather than the "debit" button when you pay with a debit card. They are NOT credit cards and do not go on your credit history. The only (real) difference is how they are treated when they are processed. I think, and I could be wrong about this, if you select "credit", then the credit card companies make money off of your transaction.
I noticed they've added a powered by sun graphic at the bottom of their page, which is loading INCREDIBLY slowly.
Coincidence, or did the sun manage to melt them, putting the bomb in dot com?
I've had a number of online banks in the past, there is not one that has not had an outage at some point or another - even regular Sunday night outages in some cases.
PayPal in my mind has a better track record than most real banks I've used! As you say, they have to, but they also will not be penalized much for a small glitch like this.
They also have the advantage that there is NOTHING else like PayPal. I've looked at other options and there are none. So where are you gonna go? I've tried two auctions in the past that tried to use non-PayPay payments, and all I can say is - never again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From what I've heard in the past, post-dating a check is merely a formality. Banks are not bound to honor the date on a check, if it is post-dated. I believe it goes back to the comment previous to mine about a check not being a line of credit but a voucher for funds. Basically, since the check was written, it must be able to be cashed immediately (legally speaking). The date is important once its in the past, for various reasons. I have not done any research on this, so I may be completely incorrect. But I thought I'd share what I had heard a few years ago.
- Ghent