Are Pre pay Cards A Advantageous Way Of Helping You To Deal with Your Debt?
Friday, March 5th, 2010Interesting query, can prepay cards improve our Debt Management and thus prevent us running up more Credit Card Debt? Are they a more viable answer to credit cards? Before we react to these queries let us have a look at precisely what a prepay card is.
Put extremely simply, it’s a card that you can bung any amount of cash on and use whenever you obtain anything. Once you have used the amount allocated on the card you can’t exceed it. You can put funds on it through all the normal methods; ATM, online, on the phone or even by way of text messaging. Instead you can go to your local post office or bank and even a few non finance sellers and get preloaded cards.
A prepay card can assist us to budget efficiently, allowing us to allocate funds for specific reasons; the weekly food allowance, or petrol for instance. Also as David Roger, managing director for the Debt Foundation charity suggests, it can help prevent us wrongly using that overdraft once more and going in to the red.
In theory it must make it better for every one of us out there who are just a bit too friendly with our credit cards. After all anything that diminishes the probability of running up more Credit Card Debt has to be worth a try hasn’t it?
An additional good aspect is that they’re not linked back to our bank account. This means if a certain nasty little character steals our card and tries to fake our identity then they won’t have access to all our precious money. Plus if they were to try and use it on the internet they wouldn’t be able run up extortionate bills.
Nonetheless before you get all excited and run out there to acquire one, there are a few things to remember. Firstly the most obvious; you can only load it with income that you already have. Would seem blatantly clear but it is very easy to disregard that that piece of plastic in your hand is not an limitless stock of credit that we can overlook when the invoice comes through. Consider the embarrassment at the checkout if you try and acquire something that is more than the money to be had on the card! A important point to commit to memory; only load it with what you can afford.
In addition there are selected fees incurred, monthly payments for example and a lot even have inactivity costs.
So, yes a different means of Debt Management they might be, but what other methods are there, other than not spending what we have not got? For starters we can help our finances by being stricter with ourselves. We really should try to curtail those impulse buys that we later on regret, but still must pay for.
Having a practical budget and keeping to it goes a great distance towards retaining a strong bank balance and reducing those worry levels.
If we are in debt up to our eyeballs then budgeting is a must. We can look at solutions such as Debt Consolidation for one, in order that we needn’t feel so overwhelmed with it all. By placing all those debts into one pot assists us to see what we’re dealing with, not only that but Debt Consolidation will enable us to have one reduced monthly payment.
Whatever we opt for the bottom line is, do not get into more debt than we can cope with.

