Funny Story

Spoiler warning, everything is fine and it all worked out. 

I noticed the other week that the money I had paid out from my Patreon account to my bank account never got there, even after eight days. Normally it only takes one or two days. I got kind of nervous. The pay-out was for two months of pledges. I had let it pile up because of changes to my reward structure, and I had been expecting to make some refunds, so I wanted to keep one month's worth of pledges sitting around. Not having that $3,000+ reach my bank account was pretty scary, and I don't know why it was happening. I didn't get any sort of notice from Patreon or anything. 

So I submitted a ticket with the help center, and I give my bank a call. My bank was actually pretty quick in letting me know that they hadn't refused any deposits or transactions to me, and that—here's the really scary part—I hadn't received any deposits from Patreon IN FOUR MONTHS!!!

I go through my back records and sure enough,  my pay outs from February and March never reached my bank account either. I hadn't noticed because I had merged two of my bank accounts at about the same time, and I had also paid my taxes, so I was just too preoccupied to notice the discrepancy, which in retrospect I should have because it was pretty huge. 

So now I'm really scared. Patreon still hadn't gotten back to me. I do some research and find out that my money is actually floating in between Patreon and a third party site called Stripe, something I've never really appreciated till now. Stripe and Paypal are the only two options for pay-outs I have. I've been going with Stripe because I used Paypal many years ago and was unsatisfied with how fickle their policies were at the time. I never really thought about Stripe though. It's always just been 'the other one' in my mind. 'The one that isn't Paypal.' 

I followed a bunch of online suggestions like updating all my routing information (which felt redundant because I didn't change anything and I just typed the same information in again) and I changed all my passwords and stuff just in case I was getting hacked. 

Then, at 12AM last night, ALL of the money from the last few months that has been floating in limbo suddenly got deposited into my bank account.  I still do not understand what the problem was, but I let Patreon know that the issue was resolved, and my week of anxiety is over. I recognize that this was probably my fault. Like, there was something in my settings that was off, but I don't know what. I went through everything, so I don't know what the trigger was. Patreon never gave me any sort of warning or update or message or anything. Maybe they never knew that the money wasn't getting from Stripe to my bank account. Maybe they did. Maybe no one knew anything and this was always in the hands of the algorithm gods. I had to discover on my own that my money wasn't where it was supposed to be. It's on me to be more vigilant in the future, which I intend to. 

So, to my patrons, If I've seemed a little preoccupied this week, this was why.