USD Purchase

With the land prices crashing, I was thinking of getting a small mainland plot.

My understanding is that LL tier is paid in USD. The question is what methods are available for me to transfer money into my USD account?

The only way I am aware of is by selling Lindens and as I am a pure consumer in SL, this sounds like a very expensive and roundabout way to buy USD as I will be hit first with the exchange rate and credit card transaction fees. Then have to sell Lindens at a worse rate than I have purchased and pay another 3.5% fee!

Is there any other more cost effective way to do this like a way to load money directly from a credit card into the USD account?


Cheers

If you owe LL tier, they'll first look at your current US$ balance and debit the amount owed from that; if that puts you into the red they'll charge the difference to whatever payment method you currently have on file (Credit Card, or PayPal).

In short, you don't really have to do anything in your case . If you owe tier, it'll just be taken from your credit card every month.

(Somewhat related, and useful to know if LL can't charge - or messes up charging -, under https://secondlife.com/account/ in the right sidebar, towards the bottom you have "Increase Your Credit" which will allow you to deposit US$ into your balance, but the only reason you'd do that is usually to do a limit buy order, or when something went wrong with billing you)

Currently I just leave my tier amount from linden sales in my account here so that my RL bank account is never touched, but I am now wanting to build my credit so was hoping I could have LL withdraw my tier fees from my credit card instead.

I remember awhile back reading things about peoples banks calling them or something and not allowing transactions from Linden Lab due to "fraud"...do you know if this is still an ongoing problem or is it safe to hook up a CC and allow LL to use that method? Does it look "bad" to have "Linden Lab Research Inc" (Or whatever they call themselves) all over your statements?

Update: Thanks Kitty!

Just read your reply again and the increase your credit option seems to be exactly what i need.



Thanks for the reply.

The problem is that I will only be purchasing a small 1024 plot and if LL is going to be charging my credit card for 5 dollars each month, I will still be hit by the currency exchange and cc fees not to mention the risks of the payment being rejected randomly by the cc company.

*waves to Alt*

I use my Mastercard for paying my teir and had never troubles with it (not for paying the teir, my premium account or the L$ I buy).

For my Mastercard I pay once per year a fee, but that is always the same fee no matter how often I use the card.

My monthly tier is 40 us$ and I am charged per month for roughly 30 Euro, which is a fair conversion.

Morwen.

*waves back at Morwen*

That would be ok for larger payments but for a payment of a couple of dollars a month, I am reluctant to pay the associated fees.

I much prefer to load usd100 in one go and forget about it. Kitty's suggestion should hopefully work.

If I understand you right, you could do that using the round-about way through "Increase Your Credit" (https://secondlife.com/account/manage_balance.php)?

LL still wouldn't use your credit card to take the tier owed, but since you added the tier amount to your balance from your credit card, it's the same result . If that made sense .

Zee Linden apparantly said that for the month of May LL made a loss on running the LindeX due to the prevalence of fraud so it probably hasn't diminished a whole lot since then.

Either way, that's LL's problem and not yours . If your bank calls you up, or blocks the charge they're looking out for you, wanting to verify that it is indeed you who put that charge through and not someone else.

In the (probably unlikely?) event that your bank would consider LL to be too much of a risk, they'd just block payment to LL, they wouldn't do anything about your card .

Same answer as Jesseaitui basically.

You could use "Increase Your Credit" to "preload" your account balance with a sum of money so you only run into the exchange and CC fees only once. The minimum for that is US$25 (so that would be 5 months of tier, not counting your premium fee).

Do keep in mind that buying L$ will deduct from your account balance first as well, before going to your credit card (which you may consider to be a plus, depending).

*off-topic mumble about vB not liking more than 5 smileys in one post *

Ah yes, I see... I heard from other as well using that way, so I think it should work.

Good luck.


Morwen.

Ah that is a good idea, I was just thinking that I would rather have my CC charged early on in the month (Tier dates are at the end of each month). So, i`ll just do it this way instead, perfect, thank you!