Bank Account

[?] Subscribe To
This Site

Bank Account

Replenishing your prepaid wireless account with your bank account is another option that is just starting to catch on. The interesting thing about using your bank account directly is that unlike debit cards, money is not validated in real time. What does this mean? Well, essentially, you could enter in your checking account information online with your wireless carrier, and request to add, let's say $25. Although they have verified that your account exists, and that you are the rightful owner, they don't know that you actually have $25 in your account.

This can present problems. For example:

The bank can respond to the wireless carrier days later (3-7 days in fact) that there is insufficient funds, which means that they're now out of pocket $25 (in the example above).
Thinking that the $25 has already been taken out of your account, you may do another withdrawal (ex. cash or debit card purchase), and that transaction takes your account below $25. So, when the bank looks for the $25 you owe your wireless carrier, it's not there. This usually results in additional fees that the bank charges, typically called NSF (Non-Sufficient Funds) charges. These fees can vary, but believe you me, you don't want to pay them!

To combat this problem, carriers will often:

Charge a per transaction fee (ex. $1 to $3) to cover the processing charges from the bank, as well as any charges for non-sufficient funds. Unlike in the postpaid world where such fees can be easily passed to you by charging it to your next bill, with prepaid, there's no guarantee that money will every show up in your prepaid account for them to take. And my understanding is that legally prepaid wireless carriers cannot take your account into a negative balance for such fees.
Force you to wait a number of days until the transaction with the bank clears. But in the prepaid world, this is a horrible customer experience. Why would you want to pay for something today that you can't use for a number of days. You're putting money on your phone today because you need it today...not three days from now, right?!

Quite honestly, I never really understood why someone would want to use their checking account and pay such fees when they can use a debit card. I expect that in the past not everyone with a checking account had a debit card, however, this has changed dramatically over the past years. Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the percentage of people with checking accounts that don't have a debit card. This is research that I still need to do.

Overall, it's fair to say that replenishing your prepaid wireless account with you bank account could be a good option for. Just keep your eye out for how fast the money will be added to your account, extra transaction/processing fees, and be sure to keep on top of your bank account balance to avoid NSF fees. Depending on your bank, you may also be able to process a payment from your bank account to your wireless account as needed or setup recurring monthly payments. This could be convenient to make sure that you never run out of money on your phone. Just remember to check out all of the fees that may or may not affect you.

Be Heard! Let prepaid wireless providers know what you want...click to fill out our survey.

Return from Bank Account to Adding Money