Last time my account expired I logged on retail to use gold to get another month. I have around 4 million gold on my main and several thousand more on alts on the same realm. Token price at the time was around 300k, but it said I didn’t have enough gold on any realm. I bought a month normal mode and it still shows the 3.8m on my main. Opened a ticket, no response.
Any thoughts? Do I need to put gold in the warbrand bank for it to work?
I’m not sure what’s going on there. Here’s the support article, which to me looks like you should’ve been fine to purchase and use the token.
I’d move this to the Customer Support Forum to see what kind of insight they can give.
If it is realm-specific, it’s less intuitive what realm you’re on with the new character select screen. If you were on a different server than your main with the gold you can change it from the Realm drop-down that’s to the top right on the screen.
The gold needs to be from characters on a single realm, as stated above, make sure your client is set to that realm.
From a support article:
" In Modern WoW, if your game time has expired, you can purchase a WoW Token for gold from the character select screen by clicking the Reactivate Now button. Each character on a single realm will contribute gold to the price of the Token."
Adding that to see that you are on that specific realm, you can see the total gold on characters and any mail they may have. You can’t see those of characters on other realms until that realm is selected.
If you are planning on taking a break and want to resub later a simple solution is buy a token from the AH before you leave and keep it in your bag. When you login later you will get an option to use it to reactivate your sub.
I changed banks, and I didn’t notice until my sub was up. It offered me to use 260k of my gold to renew my sub. I just paid for it rather than use the in-game currency. So, you don’t seem to need it in just the warband bank.
You cannot buy a WoW token from the log in screen to renew game time if the gold is in the Warbank.
Good to know. I’ll have to make sure the old bank alts still carry a token. Amazing the issues still cropping up about the Warbank not actually usable in all aspects of the game. 
Just send the gold to me. I will make sure it is well taken care of. You can take a break.
I have both. I keep tokens on an alt, and majority of my gold on a single realm.
You’ll receive the federal funding, you can have a hefty grant today!