Teens can use reloadable credit cards and prepaid credit cards to manage their money, too. In fact, for teens, virtual money management is probably going to be the way they manage all of their money in adulthood. Carrying cash, certainly checks, is going to change in the future.
What if your teen having a reloadable prepaid credit card made your life EASIER?
Teens are much more internet savvy than teens were even 5 years ago. Their social networks are truly networks – online environments and forums where they interact with their friends.
Even in their early teens, they transact business on the web. Some are involved in online games, or collect items found on eBay, or spend their money on movies and music online. They can’t do this with cash. My guess is I am not the only parent who is often asked to get on the computer and enter her own credit card information in order to cover one of my kids’ online expenses.
I bet I am also not the only parent who is regularly stopping by the ATM to withdraw cash to pay weekly or monthly allowance. I rarely carry cash myself, even though allowance payday falls on the same day each week. Without keeping a journal of some sort, I lose track of who has been paid and who hasn’t and what extra money went to which kid on a different day than the regular payday because there was suddenly an extra movie to go to or a dance to attend.
It has occurred to me that as I look for ideas to help my teens manage their money, I could use prepaid reloadable cards for paying and tracking allowance. I can think of a number of benefits:
- No chance of excessive overdraft fees should they get carried away and forget to check how much money they have on hand.
- The second user card has a separate balance from the main card so it can be tracked individually.
Money can easily be moved from card to card or from other deposit accounts online to the teens’ reloadable credit card.
- They learn to manage their money by having access to their own balance.
- Mom no longer has to run to the ATM several times a week. (My personal favorite.)
- Complete allowance management – transfer the set amount on the right day and a record of having done so through online account management.
What about the fees associated with using reloadable prepaid cards for teens?
The Vision Premier Prepaid Credit Card offers several ways to actually cut or eliminate the fees associated with prepaid credit cards.
For example, the normal weekly management fee is $.95, however, that is waived if you have at least 15 transactions within the month. There’s a $5 load fee but that can also be waived if you use direct deposit. If I had my own paycheck direct deposited to my reloadable credit card and transferred the amount of the allowance for my teen son to the user card monthly, I’d have no load fees, either.
For teens who are employed and have paychecks of their own, they can use direct deposit to load the cards and have immediate access to their funds without having to stop and cash checks.
I have several goals as a parent who is preparing teenagers for the real world and teaching them the skills necessary to achieve financial independence is one of them. Seems like there are actually a number of ideas in which using reloadabe credit cards could help my teens learn to manage their money more wisely.
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