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Comment by jack-r-abbit | Hacker News Reader

We certainly have a long way to go here. I found it endlessly frustrating trying to get an expense card for my nanny. I wanted her to have access to a set limit of my money to pay for things for the kids but not an endless supply. I wanted it to just be there. I never found any banks that had anything even remotely like that. I ended up just getting a reloadable debit card that I have to keep topping off for her. And the biggest kicker... it takes 5 business days for the money to show up on it. How does it take 5 days to move some 1s and 0s from this account to that account? And why "business days?" Do their computers not work on the weekends? Crazy and frustrating.

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Thats part of the debit card providers business model. They are making money on the float between the accounts. They are incentivized by this to make it slow.

These are pretty small amounts. I suspecdt they make more money on the overdraft fees, which puts it in the "not merely lazy or incompetent, but evil" category for me. Payday loan companies are the worst offenders in this category, I'd love to see an "uber" for that.

> Payday loan companies are the worst offenders in this category, I'd love to see an "uber" for that.

Me too, but it's very unlikely to happen. Payday loans (according to http://thehill.com/regulation/237538-borrowers-default-on-ne... and the study linked there) have a default rate of about 46% in the first two years, making them risky plays; to compensate for that, they have to increase interest rates and fees, which is a huge part of what makes them evil in the first place. Of course, the fact that 80% of payday loans are due to loan churn itself (paying off a payday loan with another) contributes to that in a big way, so maybe it could be done somehow.

I'd be interested in seeing a saner way of handling payday loans than exists right now, but I'm skeptical that it could be done in a way that isn't -- in some way -- predatory.

That's my vision and not only mine [3] - i've wrote about this [1]

Building the credit lines economy from the ground up on social networks based in trust.

Each user is assigns trust level to another users and sum of trust is calculated with decentralized algorithm [1]

[1] http://earlbarr.com/publications/trustdavis.pdf [2] https://medium.com/@kacperwikiel/social-lending-alternative-... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTqgiF4HmgQ [4] http://rachelbotsman.com/work/collaborative-finance-by-the-p... [5] Landing page for this project: https://getline.in/p/landing

Edit: I am giving 10% of service revenue to users as a basic income prototype.

Edit 2: maximum depth reached.

Why can't I reply to kwikiel?

In this era of near-zero interest rates, there is no motive to do this.

Did you ask any of your existing credit card issuers if they will allow additional cardholders on your account? Several of mine outright invited me to add other cards (under other names, not just dupes in my name) at no charge. It's trivial to set spending limits on such alternate cards.

That is crazy.

I have no idea if you can get expense cards here, but it's easy to just get another card and connect it to another account, and then load funds onto it as you need.

Several of my friends have their cards attached to an account that's usually empty, and transfer funds when needed to the card. It takes literally seconds to transfer the money, you can do it on your mobile phone in the store.

Get an AmEx. I can add cards under anyone's name to my account, and set a spending cap of my choosing on a per-card basis.

You might want to check out True Link Financial (https://www.truelinkfinancial.com/). Not sure what the current state of the agreements are but you can use it technically for this sort of thing.

Thanks for the link. I looked at them. They even have one targeted specifically for Caregivers. (https://www.truelinkfinancial.com/caregiver-card) While it sounds like a decent option, I'm turned off by a $10 monthly fee. I know they have to make money somehow but I have never been keen to pay fees for my money. :/

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