To Recommend or Not To Recommend NetSpend Prepaid Credit Cards- Final Update

The "NetSpend Nightmare" started on Friday, October 31, 2014, and in an attempt to reach someone via Twitter, I wrote the first blog post about this NetSpend Nightmare, so that I could link to it from Twitter, and hopefully give whoever is supposed to be manning the Twitter account a full picture.

Apparently, no one is manning the Twitter account. Or, maybe they are and they're just ignoring my Tweets.  I tagged their Twitter @ handle and hash tag'd them too... all to no avail.

I spent the better part of yesterday, still attempting to resolve the issue, writing another blog post about this NetSpend Customer Service Nightmare, updating the continued debacle, and tweeting each update...

My tweets were never answered and multiple phone calls yielded the same lack of results from one incompetent customer service rep, and supervisor, after another.

Finally, we got through to a very nice woman named "Michelle," who understood the problem, and who either knew there was a 'procedure' to resolve the problem, or she bothered to look it up, which no one else seemed interested in bothering to do.

So yes, the situation did finally get resolved. But 5 days of pure Hell was the cost of it.  And it was an unnecessary cost, because obviously, there IS a procedure for exactly what we needed, but the reps are so poorly trained that they don't know it, and they're too lazy to bother to actually go look for it... but above all, adding insult to injury, is the supervisor's 'arrogance.'

Every time we asked for a supervisor, we were kept on hold for up to 30 minutes, only to finally be told that the supervisors are 'busy with other calls,' and 'they have no way to call you back, so could you call back in 30 minutes?"  (Oh yea sure, and go through voicemail Hell again, to get to a human again, who is going to refuse to put the supervisor on the phone until you go through the 'process' with them, again, at which point, they will put you on hold, again, and either hang up on  you, or keep you on hold for up to 30 minutes and then tell you to call back in 30 minutes and repeat the process again...)  And worse, the 2-3 times we did manage to speak with a supervisor, they were arrogant and flippant, shutting us down completely when we were asking them to DO what 7 people CONFIRMED they COULD do, before hanging up on us.)  

If that's how you want to spend your day, then I guess I would recommend NetSpend to you.

For the rest of you, the card has it's advantages and it's disadvantages, like everything else.

The two main things to consider are the 'fees,' and the ability to transfer funds between cards.

I use both NetSpend and Green Dot cards.

Green Dot has no monthly service fee as long as you deposit at least $1,000 per month. Hubbies paycheck goes to that card, so we pay no fee.  If you deposit less than $1,000 per month, you pay $1.00 per transaction.   

With the NetSpend card, it doesn't matter how much you deposit, you have to pay $5.00 or $10.00 (depends on your card usage) each month to have unlimited transactions for free.

The Green Dot card though, doesn't let us transfer from one card to another card.

NetSpend does.

And the reason that's important to me, is because when I get freelance work online, my clients send the money to his PayPal account (I lost mine years ago due to consumer fraud that was beyond my control- this is very common).  He then transfers the money to his NetSpend account, and then once it's deposited in his account, he transfers it to my NetSpend account.  From card to card is instant, and it's free.

If I had my own PayPal account, we wouldn't need to use NetSpend for it's 'card to card' transfer abilities, and I would never use it again at all.

We're currently looking into other prepaid cc's, or possibly adding another 'local' friends bank account to the PayPal account so we can just send it to that bank when transferring out of PayPal, and then go up to that bank to withdraw cash.  So we can get rid of NetSpend entirely.