I am looking around on paypal and I saw somewhere that the paypal balance is the default funding source. Then, I swear I saw that the default was my bank account and that I could change it to the paypal balance. Where exactly do I check to make sure my pp balance is the first place a payment will be debited?
Typically, the preference is existing paypal balance, followed by credit card and then bank. If you do not have any paypal balance, it would take from the other sources in that order. However, if you are paying a subscription, it cannot be taken from a paypal balance and thus the other options are being use. I am not certain in your case if you are just doing a normal payment, do you have an example of this ?
I believe you are correct as indicated by the actions that I took today. I payed for something today and the payment was taken from the balance even though I have a bank account on record. This was a one time payment. While looking around to make sure that my bank would not be debited for this purchase I found the recurring payment set up. And that was set to debit from bank account as the default funding source. You need to click this off if you want to have recurring payments taken out of the paypal balance.
I think if you click that option off, it would stop the recurring payment altogether. The last time I asked Paypal about it and they told me that recursive payments can be done only via a credit card because like you I had a lot of paypal balance which was unused. In any case, it may be different in your case in which you can fund a reurring payment via the paypal balance.