Venmo

In our increasingly cashless world, it's become a big hassle to split restaurant checks, reimburse friends, or divide up shared bills and purchases. But if you have Venmo, doing these things is easier than it's ever been before. Founded in 2009 and owned by PayPal, Venmo is a hugely popular mobile payment app. With this finance app on your phone, you'll always have a convenient option to pay for things, even when you leave your wallet at home. Best of all, you'll never have to utter the phrase "sorry, I don't have any cash" again.

Product Features

With billions of dollars sent and received each year, Venmo's most popular feature is payment transfers. Once you create an account, you'll have a balance that you can feed with a connected bank account, debit card, or credit card. At any time, you can withdraw money from your chosen source instantly to use for purchases and transactions. Alternatively, you can order a Venmo MasterCard and use it for your payments instead. If you're using a bank account, your payments will be free, but using debit or credit cards comes with a 3% fee.

For security purposes, your transactions will be limited to $299.99 in total until you verify your identity. After verification, that limit shoots way up to a limit of $2,999.99 every seven days. Also for your protection, Venmo cash transfers aren't technically instantaneous. If you make a mistake, you can cancel a payment that you've sent; it won't become final for one to three business days.

You're probably wondering how long it takes to get money from your Venmo balance into your hands or checking account. Well, if you're willing to pay a 1% fee on your transfer (topping out at $10), you can gain complete access to those funds in less than 30 minutes. If you're in no hurry, you can use the standard bank transfer feature and skip the fee. In that case, you'll have the money within a few business days.

The thing that sets Venmo apart from other payment apps is its social networking feature. On your Venmo app, you'll have a news feed similar to what you'd see on a typical social networking platform. On this feed, you'll see what your friends are paying for (but not the specific amount) as well as notes or emojis they've included. Whenever you send a payment, you can create a custom message to go along with it. Most people use this feature to specify what they're paying for, but many also choose to have some fun with it and make jokes. If you have your payment set to public