Well, ultimately you have to decide for yourself whether it might be short-sighted to suffer the long-term inconvenience of losing your PayPal account over one potential refund, if you feel so strongly about it. Personally I keep almost nothing in my PayPal account (and other online payment processing accounts).
Losing a paypal account is always painful. But sometimes the amount is so big that you can not manage to refund and can not afford it .
It's not advisable to leave a lot of money in Paypal. Just have some enough to pay for hosting and some other items which you normally buy.
How about transferring money from PayPal to an online account that just holds your money but is not a bank? Is there such a thing?
You can keep as much as you feel safe. You must be carefully to phising, viruses and other methods to steal your information. If you think you can`t fall to those schemes there is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn't keep anything in their. This thread has actually helped keep off some worries. I was getting deposits from an online company for running their ads and they decided they over paid me. They filed a complaint and paypal froze my account and took me negative for the amount that was missing. I am still fighting the dispute but the amount is worth me losing my paypal account for. I was worried about them withdrawing from my bank account. Check payments from here on out for me.
Fredduggan, The fact that this happened in your paypal account is irrelevent. If you were getting direct deposits, they can be reversed too. The only non-reversible methods of receiving cash are things like western union, and e-gold. These methods are seen with suspicion. Nowadays, even a check received in the mail and deposited can be reversed like a chargeback. I think I'd remove money above $500 from my Paypal account.
This thread is going to be a very useful one. Thank you everyone for taking a keen interest in this thread. I hope this should keep on running and all of we can share our problems regarding paypal here. Still, I have a much to learn about paypal.....
As long as you are doing selling & buying with verified paypal users, and doing nothing shady, then it is fine to keep a lot of money in it.
I dont think I have had more then 300$ in my paypal balance and I used that pretty quickly. I dont think I would ever keep more then $500 unless I had a very good reason.
It is advisable to keep not more than $500, because paypal does not give us any interest on the money kept.
With a verified account - maybe it's safe .. Without it - they can close it in a few seconds and to get it back, you will need a few months !