Pay for Premium Membership with PayPal balance?
 

Time's up on my premium membership. I went to resubscribe. PayPal was the only option (that's fine), but it would only let me pay with the debit card behind my balance, even though I have plenty of money to cover the charger.

My PayPal account is my bike slush fund. I'd really rather use it for this one-time debit. Why can't I?

My subscriptions renewal came up not long ago. Site bosses insisted on PayPal only. Since they allowed no other option and I had no desire to deal with PayPal they lost me as a paying subscriber. I just deal with the ads.

I don't mind PayPal. I use it all the time. I object to being forced to use my backup payment method. I've encountered this before for recurring payments, but this seems pretty clearly to not be. (At least there is no indication it is.)

Any input on the mods from this? I got a reminder a couple days ago that my premium account had expired. The only reason I hadn't already renewed was this limitation.

Skip, I have sent a PM to our corporate admin liaison asking him to look into this.

My apologies for the late reply. I misunderstood your question before and thought it was settled. Bike Forums is in fact a recurring payment.

I understand that. I want it to preferentially pay with my balance and only ding my backup source if my balance comes up short. That doesn't seem to ever come up as an option.

Go here: https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/

Select Bike Forums, then change the payment method to "Use balance first"

Thanks IBJoel . Maybe it's just the way things are worded, but it sure looked like it was going to use my backing source (happens to be a debit card as my wife beat me to the bank account with her account). Despite it saying it would use my backing account in big bold letters, in little tiny letters it said it would use my balance first. I held my breath and resubscribed. Lo and behold, it did ding my PayPal balance for the subscription.

Make sure you don't have multiple subscriptions to Bike Forums going at the same time, too!