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I spent the close of 2015 traveling and did not get around to closing out my REDBird card’s and moving back to Serve until last week. Haven’t even loaded 3 of 4 and, bam, they put the hit on most everyone more established (except of course Dan, he seems to be first to a deal and last out).
I have no access to Walmart so was already on the fence about the denuded online load options for new Serve cards. So much work for small ball.
For those interested, I did just load $200 fine from one of my new accounts.
Questions as this plays out:
- For those just starting out, will there be a ‘safe’ amount of activity?
- Will those shut down be able to get new Amex prepaid cards sometime in the future?
- Can Amex charge a monthly fee on an account with zero balance? Would be nice to sit on my new accounts that never had activity.
Really, the question to ask is: Did anyone not in manufactured spend ever open a Bluebird, Serve or REDBird?
I get the feeling there’s a spreadsheet at Amex that shows the average account holder loaded $5,000/month and bill paid the same. Compared to alternatives, these are great products for the unbanked. I wonder if they’ll survive in the market without their unintended customers.
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Dani – confused as to your USAA comment. I have USAA and I love it BECAUSE they don’t have any physical branches. You can use literally any ATM and they reimburse you the fees at the end of the month, you can digitally deposit checks from your phone, and USAA.com has a robust online bill pay section. What did you need BB for?
“Really, the question to ask is: Did anyone not in manufactured spend ever open a Bluebird, Serve or REDBird?”
I did, because, I bank with USAA and live in California there are no branches here. The problem I had using BB (as it was intended?) all bill payment had to come from bb to whoever. For example, my gas bill can only be paid online from a checking account. With bb I could not set up auto pay from the gas company to BB. So, for me bb was not useful for that and other reasons.
I was in line be at Walmart behind someone who loaded $32 in cash to her bluebird. She apologized for slowing down the line and I was like, “hey, take all the time you need sister. Without people like you using the product as intended, people like me wouldn’t be able to ms with it”. Or maybe I said, “no problem, I’ve got one too”. 🙂
Oh well, lazy days of bluebird are over. Now I’ll have to work harder. Or maybe just think harder and spend less time at Walmart.
A bad decision- a lot of people got shut down even not WM runners