Get a Reloadable Credit Card – How to Apply

How do you get a reloadable credit card? To apply, simply fill out an available online offer. It is as easy as it gets when looking for deposit accounts you can use to manage your money. There are a number of low cost cards which can be applied for online and approval is often 100% guaranteed.

The application for the Vision Premier Prepaid Card, for example, consists of no more than a request for your name, email, address, phone numbers, date of birth, social security number, and an indication of whether or not you have direct deposit available to you.

Consumers get a bit concerned when they see the request for their social security number. However, financial institutions are required by law under the Patriot Act to ask for this information. Vision makes it clear that they never check your credit report for their prepaid card and that they are only collecting this information because of the federal requirement to do so.

How can these reloadable credit card companies make statements like “100% approval guaranteed”? I thought credit cards always required a credit check?

The reason is that there is no extension of credit to the consumer. When a financial institution decides to lend money, they are assuming some degree of risk – they might not get repaid. Customers run into financial difficulties all the time and some portion of those consumers may be forced into a position where they can’t make the card payments. The bank loses some of its money either by having to spend more money to collect on the outstanding balance or by never getting their money back.

Reloadable credit cards are not really credit cards – you are using your own money to fund the balance. In that respect, they are much more like a checking account.

Even checking accounts, though, present a higher risk to financial institutions than a prepaid card. Checks are negotiable items – they can be turned into cash or used as cash but there isn’t a method to check the available balance of a check before someone accepts it as payment. This means there is some degree of risk to the bank that a customer will write a check for more than the available balance, putting the bank – again – in the potential situation of losing money.

As a result, banks do a more in depth background check before allowing someone to open a checking account. They use a database called Chex Systems when deciding whether or not to allow someone to open a checking account. If you’ve had previous problems with a checking account – overdraft checks or an outstanding checking account balance that was not paid back – your name may have been entered into this system and you are likely to be declined a checking account.

Remember – no extension of credit so reloadable credit card companies don’t really care about anything related to your previous pay history on other credit accounts and they do not look at Chex Systems.

To get a reloadable credit card, visit the online application of an available offer, submit your information and wait for the email that provides you with your account information.