If you are rubbish with money and you cannot possibly control your spending habit, you should probably consider a prepaid credit card. It is, contrary to popular belief, still a credit card. Just because it doesn’t work in the same way as a conventional credit card doesn’t make it any different in the way that you spend credit; only this way the credit is already on the card because you put it there…
This can train youngsters to manage their future credit responsibilities a little better; and also you. If you sit down and work out what you have available to spend each month on this or that, and then put that amount of credit on the card, you can then pay for these goods and services with that card instead. This allows you to get used to not using the card for anything other than what you’ve loaded it for. It really is good money management training, and it’s worked for several of my friends. There are also sometimes reward systems in place on some of these prepaid debit cards, so that gives you even more reason to try one out. Most of them are free also, so you needn’t worry about spending more money just to teach yourself not to use credit in a irresponsible way.
The other more important thing about a prepaid card it that you can get one from around the age of 13. This is good for two reasons. One is written above and concerns the training advice, and the other is that you can prevent your teenage kids from carrying around cash, thus lowering the risk of them losing their money or worse.
Tags: credit training, money management, Prepaid credit cards