5 Ways To Add Money To Apple Cash

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you five ways that you can add money to your Apple Cash Account.

Apple Cash is Apple's system for small payments. You can use the Messages App, for instance, to pay people money you owe. Maybe you split lunch and you want to send them your half. Maybe somebody gave you a lift and you want to give them some money for gas. That kind of thing. There are a lot of kids that don't yet have bank accounts with debit cards. Certainly not credit cards. Their parents use this as a way they can use their phone, with Apple Pay, to pay for some things. The problem is how to get money into an Apple Cash account. There are three or four ways that are widely talked about. But none of those really worked for me. Oh, they work. I just don't really prefer those methods. There had to be a simpler way to do it. After experimenting I found an ideal way to do it that for some reason nobody talks about. It is not mentioned in blog posts. It's not mentioned in other videos. So let's look at the different ways I found to add money to Apple Cash even the one that AI's for some reason don't like to tell you about. 

So first is the main, obvious way, to do it. That is to simply take money from a card in your Apple Wallet and add money from there to Apple Cash. But, there is a catch. It only works with Debit Cards. You need to have a debit card in your account. Credit cards won't work. For me I only had credit cards in my account. I really don't use debit cards. So I don't have one there and it is just not a good way for me to add money to Apple Cash. But probably most people do it this way. What you would do is you would tap on Apple Cash in the Apple Wallet and that will take you to the Apple Cash screen. From there you would tap on the three dots, or more button at the top, and then select Add Money. That is pretty straight forward and obvious. But it only works if you have a debit card. If you don't have a debit card it is going to tell you, you have to add a debit card. If you do have one you'll get to this next screen and you can type an amount and then have that added to Apple Cash. You can even set this up to automatically do it on a schedule. 

Now I just don't happen to like using a debit card. But if you're okay with that and you just  don't have a debit card another way to do it is to get a prepaid debit card. So this isn't tied to a bank account. You go to a store to purchase these. A lot of them are rechargeable. You can add money to them online. Some, not all, some of those cards you can add to your Apple Wallet and then use to transfer money from the prepaid debit card to Apple Cash. It is a big mystery as to which one works and which ones don't. The consensus seems to be that if you simply call the issuing bank and ask them they should be able to tell you whether it works in Apple Wallet and whether you can add Apple Cash using that card. The thing about that is you can literally take cash to a store and buy one of these cards with the cash and then transfer the money to Apple Cash. So this would be the way to take cash and convert it to Apple Cash. 

Now another way to do it, and this is actually a rather popular way to do it with when a kid with an iPhone and an Apple Cash account and the parent wants to let them use it to buy things in stores and such. That's to send money using Messages. So in the Messages App you can be chatting with somebody. You can tap the Plus Button and then it brings up the menu. One of the things there is to Send Apple Cash. You can tap that and now you can put in an amount. It will take Apple Cash from your account and send it to that person. So say a parent can take Apple Cash from their account that they added with their debit card or however they did it, and say give $20 to their kid so they can buy themselves lunch. 

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The last two methods require that you have an Apple Card. An Apple Credit Card. So I've got one of those and one of things about it is it is one of those cash back cards. You get a really tiny percentage back with each purchase. So what happens to that money that you get back. Well, you can tap on your Apple Card in your wallet there and then tap on the More button there, tap on Rewards and Offers. Here's where you can set what happens to the daily cash back that you get. One of the things you can have happen to it, maybe the only thing if that is all you have setup, is have it go to Apple Cash. So you may get a few dollars here and a few dollars there going into Apple Cash.  When you need Apple Cash, maybe to pay somebody who you owe for dinner or something, you can simply use the cash that you have accumulated there. For a lot of people this is all they will ever need to use Apple Cash occasionally. 

Then we get to the final method. The one that, for some reason nobody seems to mention, but it works great if you've got an Apple Card you can do this. The trick is you have to open up an Apple Savings Account. Now I'm pretty sure that if you have an Apple Card you're eligible for an Apple Savings Account. There may be a few edge cases where you're not. But, you can open an Apple Savings Account. This page at Apple's site tells you who can open an Apple Account and how to do it. You just do it through the app on your iPhone. I watched somebody do this the other day and it just took them seconds to do it. It is just a very simple savings account. There's nothing special about it. You access it through the Wallet App. You can transfer money in there from another account at another bank just like you would expect with any other savings account. You can also, of course, have your daily cash back go into that savings account. So even if you never add any money to it, it may start to accumulate a little bit and it will earn interest on top of that. 

Now once you have an Apple Savings Account you can transfer money from the Apple Savings Account to Apple Cash. I don't know why this isn't talked about more. This is the method I greatly prefer and will use from now on. So you tap on your Apple Card there and one of the things you'll see under your Apple Card when you have an Apple Savings Account, is your savings account there. So go into that. It will show you your balance and all of that. Now you won't find a button here to transfer money from your Apple Savings Account to your Apple Cash. It's not there. It is not intuitive but you actually tap the Withdraw Button. The Withdraw Button allows you to select an amount and then you can withdraw from savings and then you can transfer to another account or transfer to Apple Cash. So while you can't transfer money from any other savings account into Apple Cash, or from any credit card including the Apple Card to Apple Cash, you can go from Apple Savings to Apple Cash which for a lot of people, like me, is the easy straight forward simplest way to add a few bucks to Apple Cash when you need it. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.