What are your Secure, Private Payment Methods - Prepaid credit cards ?
There is monero but of course you cant pay with it everywhere.
It just creates Alias Credit Cards so you can pay wherever you want without using your real CC.
Cash. Doesn’t track you.
5 Likes
Apple pay - the card information is stored on device and the receiver gets masked card.
3 Likes
PayPal, Google Pay, Wal-Mart Digital Wallet, Amazon Gift cards…
My above examples are to normalize your private purchases.
My checking and banking accounts are used only to pull cash out of, to pay, at the time one Major Credit Card, (MCC) and for reoccurring transactions connected to my real name.
Last month I made two in store purchases with my MCC and one of those times I purchased a $500 Vanilla pre-paid credit card just for online use. I probably have 4 or 5 cards with some balance on them. This month is budgeted to look the same.
Yesterday I made one of the two free virtual credit cards a month I get with IronVest. This was a mistake. In frustration (with a PayPal account, captcha or browser issue) with buying directly from a website I used IronVest masked credit cards. It was a small purchase and I could have used a prepaid card.
Today I am going to use IronVest to make a Virtual Card for free to use on an anonymous Amazon account. If I get banned / blocked by Amazon I can use the same virtual card information for any other online purchase or add it to an anonymous PayPal or Google Pay account.
Cash is great no doubt. DeleteMe is a service which I pay for annually. IronVest Premium service comes with your DeleteMe membership. The $3 in credits for masked phone calls plus the two free virtual cards I value at $5 ea. Is easily worth $13 a month in benefits. The cost of DeleteMe is $10.75 a month or $129 annually. If you maximize the benefits you basically save more than you spend. The MCC I use to fund these Virtual cards gives me 1% cash back.
The cost of the Vanilla gift card is $4.95 and if you load up $500 your 1% cash back covers that cards $5.
Not saying I do but I can move $1,500 a month over to anonymous credit to fund all the anonymous accounts for what feels like for free.
Kicking myself for using one of my free virtual cards for that one website purchase. IronVest was used to make the masked email address so it was just too easy to make a virtual card at the same time as I forgot we were in a new month. My pre paid credit cards I try to use in real life for paying for meals and bars, until the balance is low for convenience over cash.
Speaking of my budget my partner schedule a contractor to repair a cracked glass in a window this month. We used the MCC to pay for the service. The contractor was in my home so privacy was not a real concern but the security of MCC is a slight issue. No big deal but we do not have zero trust with the contractor. Cash may have worked but we needed a CC to pay over the phone. Could have used the prepaid cards as the repair was under $500.
Just checked pricing of just IronVest. To get the premium plan on IronVest is $99/year. For $30 more you can get DeleteMe with all the same benefits, or save $30 if you do not want DeleteMe.