Can I Venmo you?  I’ve asked that question many times over the past year.  More often than not in my age group, the answer is no.  This makes me so sad.  The ones that do have it, tend to have college age kids.  Those kids pretty much exclusively use Venmo or other electronic means – no cash.  If you owe someone money for something or are collecting for a group purchase of some kind – it is so much quicker to just Venmo. 

It’s more likely that you have used PayPal – Venmo is now owned by PayPal.  So why have both? In simple terms, Venmo is more for small, personal transactions, while PayPal is much more heavily used for online merchant payment services.  Originally used primarily for eBay transactions, most sites you go to purchase online now have a PayPal option as well.

Venmo http://www.venmo.com is a mobile first platform – the downloaded app is where it’s all happening.  PayPal has a strong mobile presence as well, but there are a good number of features still only available via the PayPal website https://www.paypal.com .

In terms of security, both have bank grade encryption and you can be confident that your information is secured.  Well – as much as you can be confident with any online transactions.  If you look at your Venmo feed, you will see all the transactions among your contacts.  It’s just another loss of privacy in my opinion of the social media world.  By default, I make all my transactions private…maybe that won’t be the case someday – but I value that small privacy in this world with very little privacy. Check out this article if you want to dive more into the details: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/032415/how-safe-venmo-and-why-it-free.asp

In terms of fees, both allow you to transfer to/from your bank without fees but add a fee for credit card transactions.  Both also have processing times for transfers to bank accounts.  Venmo now has a fee paid option to transfer via your debit card instantly to your bank account – which is useful if you need the cash in your account ASAP.

Venmo now also offers a debit card.  This really makes things easier for the Venmo generation that uses it for so many things.  No need to transfer to your bank in order to make a purchase from your Venmo balance.

To be perfectly clear – Venmo is not a credit card and does not allow you all the protections you are offered when purchasing with credit.  While most transactions are small amounts – there are times, paying rent, etc that it is a larger amount.  MAKE SURE you are sending it to the correct person.  It’s a good idea to have a profile picture in there so people know it’s you.  While it is possible to get your money back if you send it to the wrong person – it’s very difficult.

Pretty sure at some point soon I will be done writing checks and forgetting to pay people back as I can do it right away.  That day cannot come quickly enough for me!