I talked to many people that wanted prepaid credit cards for teens but it wasn’t something I knew about when I had the telemarketing job but you could get prepaid or secured cards from some companies.

Not all prepaid cards are reloadble but all plastic that can be reloaded are prepaid. Now I’m not sure teenage credit cards are a great idea. It would depend on how responsible the teen is but you could teach them by giving them a reloadable card and putting their allowance on it each week.

That’s not really what I want to talk about tho. I wasn’t as good at telemarketing cards as other people were. My sales were somewhere in the middle of the pack. Heh, the company I worked for didn’t like my technique either as it wasn’t part of the approved script but they allowed it because I could make sales, I was just never going to be a top performer.

When I talked with people who were having card problems and were close to their limits on most of their cards I would teach them about balance transfers to get their payments down. You see, most credit cards wanted you to transfer your other cards charges to the new card.

Some companies would give them a 0% interest rate on transferred balances for 6 months to a year. I’d explain to them they could lower their card payments by transferring their highest interest rate cards to the new card. Some of the people were saving hundreds of dollars per month by doing that.

However to really make it work, they couldn’t charge anything on the cards they transferred balances from and they really needed to be making payments on the balance they transferred. If they didn’t they would soon be back into credit card trouble and it would be worse than it was before.

However for the people who were smart enough to not charge anymore on the old cards it was a good method for getting themselves back into some kind of liquid financial shape. I also explained that if they kept their payments up and didn’t miss any they’d be getting more pre approved card offers and when it was getting close to time to start paying interest on the card I talked them into they needed to get another card with the same 0% interest on balance transfers and then transfer whatever balance was left.

That way they would never have to pay any interest on the balance they had transferred and could get out of debt faster. What with the troubled financial times we are having now that scheme still works so I thought I’d post it so others in need might be able to use it.

Reality is a lot of people live on their cards and if they lose them they are screwed. If they miss a payment or go over their limit their rates get raised to astronmical prices. Don’t let that happen to you. Transferring balances is one way to keep your credit good.

However the best way, be it teenager or adult, is to pay off your balance every month. It’s how I use my card. I also use a rewards card so almost everything I buy, every month, is put on the card. The money I get back or the credits I get at places comes to between $400-$500 per year. IOW I make money with my credit card.

It takes discipline to make that work tho and most people just don’t have the discipline to do that. Should your cards ever get cancelled the first thing I would suggest, for convenience sake, is getting a prepaid and reloadable credit card. It’s very hard to survive in our current society without a credit card and almost impossible to buy anything on the net without some type of card.

Debit cards attached to your checking account also work and work very well. They also have no interst on them so you might want to go that way instead. However, unless you have a very, very responsible teenager there’s no way I’d give them a regular credit card. Teens just don’t have the understanding that cash has to be paid sooner or later for the items they charged.

Best advice I can give you is to use your cards very carefully and not for spur of the moment purchases. If you do get in card trouble look at transferring some of your higher interest balances to your lower interest or no interst cards as a short term soulution.