Newbie question on Second Life Credit Purchases

Ok, from what I've been able to piece together, I did this kinda screwy.

I put $25 USD credit into my account. When I go buy it tells me "This transaction would exceed your daily billing limit by US$4.7. You have already billed US$25.00 of your daily billing limit US$25.00."

My understanding is, I need to wait a certain amount of time before I can make a purchase against this credit.

What is that time?

If you have already put 25 USD on your account, what exactly are you doing? Are you putting more USD credit? You should just be buying L at this point.

I am. When I go to "buy Lindens" and purchase $25/worth, it gives me that error.

That $25 credit counts as your total allowable purchase for the first day...you should have gone straight to the 'Buy L$' link. Your limit will increase on day 2, so you'll be able to convert the $25 to L$ then.

Your first purchase is considered day 0, so you may have to wait 48 hours.

First of all, welcome to SecondLife and welcome to the Forums!

This happens a lot, and it's pretty frustrating for new residents. Not sure just what the Lindens are trying to protect against with this particular hurdle.

Many buy L$s on slexchange.com, but you've already got that US$25 credit in your account. So, I'd suggest trying the Lindex currency exchange again, but after making an adjustment to your account settings. On http://secondlife.com/account/ there will be a link on the right side column for "Linden Dollar Exchange Settings." There, choose "Advanced" so you can place limit orders on the exchange. Then select "Linden Dollar Exchange" and the big orange "Buy L$s" button. Scroll way down to the list of "Open Buy Orders" and notice the lowest current price (L$276/US$ as I type this), then scroll back up to the "Buy at a specific rate" box and enter a price one L$ less (so, L$275 currently*) into the "Exchange rate" field, and some desired number of L$s in the "Quantity" field (keeping the estimated total under US$25). Somebody else will sell L$s "at market" and your order will be filled--usually within just a few minutes.

Now, that's how it works when no trading limits are exceeded, so Your Mileage May Vary, but I've heard that this works for new accounts even when the standard, "market buy" fails. (Even if it doesn't work, it's good practice: this gets about a 3.5% discount from a market buy.) Please let us know how it goes, and good luck!

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*You could actually try for an even higher exchange rate and wait it out, but there's currently about L$42 million in queue to buy for 276, so that could be a pretty long wait.