I am the caregiver for my elderly mother. Since moving closer to her a year ago, I have been picking up her household goods. Prior to this, my brother and SIL did this with cash I made available via a standard bank check.
I was drawn to PayPal by wakerupper.com, which I use to set up reminder phone calls for her. They use PayPal as a method of buying another block of 100 calls without my having to dig out the debit card I hold as the finanacial POA on my mother's checking account.
After a few months of this bit of easiness, I decided, and may have been enticed with a $5 offer, to use PayPal. I decided, why even bother to go to the bank to deposit a check for reimbursement when I buy her groceries on my credit card? (For the points, and I had a special offer to encourage higher credit card usage this summer.) I set up a PayPal account for me and one for my mother, and I am legally entitled to do this as her financial POA.
My old method would have been to log on to her checking account and send myself a check for the amount of groceries purchased on my credit card to take part in this credit card bonus point offer. Then I would go to a bank ATM and deposit this check into my personal account. She got her groceries and I was merely reimbursing myself for the amount charged to my credit card, plus the $75 bonus I earned as a credit card bonus with the limited special offer.
I was quite stunned when I saw all these transactions show up with "print shipping label" notation and with the amount I collected being less than what I had charged on my credit card.
1) Explain to me how wakerupper.com is able to be paid their $5 exactly? My mother's bank account has never been charged anything different from when I used to input her debit card info manually every 3-4 weeks for reminder phone calls versus when I set it up on the wakerupper.com Web site to pay via PayPal.
2) What do I do with all these purchases I had set up on PayPal to reimburse me for putting her groceries on my credit card? We are just over 30 days on these eCheck transactions. I was astonished by the amount withheld for a fee on a payment as low as $9.15! On my PayPal end, I was never asked if I wanted to accept a reduced payment, but the money is now in my PayPal account. I never saw on my mother's end that fees would be incurred on my end as I set up the eChecks to reimburse me, or I would have canceled them immedidately. I would like to just cancel these payments, and if they cannot be canceled, get out of this error as cheaply as possible.
