Friendly advice for buyers using PayPal

If you are buying something with PayPal, it is beneficial to NOT pay with any funds sitting in your PayPal account. Instead, draw the funds from a linked bank account. This way, if something goes sideways, you may be covered by your bank in addition to PayPal.

I sent a personal payment to someone I trusted, and that person did not deliver. PayPal couldn't do anything (for them a personal payment is a gift), but my bank can (I have documentation that the payment was for goods which were not delivered).

Thanks for this! That will likely be helpful in the future. I have also run into the problem as a seller that when someone requested a refund, and my paypal account was empty, it wouldn't draw from my bank and instead locked me out of the paypal account. I didn't want to be paypal-less for a few days so I had to have a friend send me temporary funds to kill the negative balance and let me actually use it again. Once it got back to zero it would let me draw from my bank again.