Additional Credit Card Options: Secured Cards, Debit Cards, And Prepaid Cards

A secured credit card requires you to make a deposit into a savings account to obtain a credit limit. This deposit is held as a security for the amount you purchase using the card. In the event that you fail to make your payment for whatever reason, the deposit covers your payment.

Secured credit cards are good for those who have bad credit or no credit at all. It is a way to begin rebuilding your credit by demonstrating that you can make timely payments. From the creditor's perspective, the deposit you pay decreases your credit risk, so the credit feels comfortable extending credit to you.

A debit card is directly linked to your checking account. When you use your debit card to make purchases, it is similar to using a check. The amount of the purchase will be deducted from your checking account within one to three days.

There are two kinds of debit cards: direct and deferred. A direct debit card requires a personal identification number (PIN) to be used when you make purchases. Purchases made with a direct debit card are subtracted from your checking account almost immediately. A deferred debit has a Visa or Mastercard logo and requires a signature for purchases. In many cases, both the direct and the deferred debit functions are present on the same account.

A prepaid credit card is a hybrid of the secured credit card and the debit card. With a prepaid credit card, you load a certain amount of money onto the credit card. Normally, this is anywhere between $10 and $1,500. The amount of money you load onto the account is the amount you are able to spend. Each time you spend money using a prepaid card, your available amount is reduced by the amount you have spent. For example, if you have $1,500 on your prepaid credit card and you spend $100, you then have $1400 available to spend.

One of the benefits of a prepaid credit card is that there is no interest rate on purchases you make. Since you are spending money that you've loaded onto the card, the card issuer has not extended credit to you. It is also easy to manage a prepaid card because you cannot spend more than you have put onto the card.

Prepaid credit cards also have their drawbacks in hefty fees charged for the credit card. Application fees, monthly maintenance charges, fees for adding and withdrawing money, and overdraft charges, are just a few of the charges that come along with using a prepaid card.

Each of these kinds of cards has their advantages and disadvantages. If you are shopping around for a card, weigh the pros and cons to make the best decision for your purchasing habits.

Information and Articles: http://www.mastersmba.com

Providing Information on various topics, please browse our other Articles for more informative resources, we house information on every topic imaginable so regardless of your needs you can be assured to find the answer here. If you wish to reprint this on your own website, simply click the "Web Version" in the right menu, and you are presented with a pre-formatted document to use.

A lot of the information is written by the Master Article team, and published exclusively on the MastersMBA.com website, and we do our best to research all information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. However at times we also publish documents given to us by other sources, we do examine these documents to ensure they are as accurate and correct as possible however at times they discuss highly specialized fields making it hard to authenticate the validity of every fact in the document. These are written by specialists in their respective fields, and we do trust their integrity and judgment however it's always a good idea when doing any research to consult a number of sources and form your own conclusion based on a number of view points.