Summary – The READYdebit™ Card is a prepaid credit card that is designed for people who have very poor credit. Because it is a prepaid credit card and no credit lines are extended, you are guaranteed to be approved (provided you give all relevant information when you apply for the card). The issuing entity will not perform any checkchex, credit report checks. Hence, even those who have just gotten out of bankruptcy and apply for this card. Let’s look at this card in greater details.

Fees – The most important feature in selecting a prepaid card is the fees that they charge. You really do not want to pay more than necessary. The Ready Debit Card comes in two versions – the “basic” and the “select” version. We’ll go through the basic version first and then highlight the differences with the “select version”.

Firstly, you have to pay a card issuance fee of $9.95. There is also a monthly fee of $4.50 (which works out to $54 a year). For pin based transactions, you incur a fee of $0.95. Signature based transactions for both domestic and international transactions are free.

For the “select version”, the monthly fee is $8.95 instead of $4.95, but pin based transactions are free and you can get an additional secondary card at $10.

For ATM withdrawals, the fee is $2.25 and if you do an ATM withdrawal overseas, it is $5.

One of the unique thing about this card is that if you accidentally have a negative balance, you will not be hit by any fees at all.

Loading Your Card – With all prepaid cards, you have to load the card before you can use it. For the Ready Debit Card, Direct Deposit, Retail Cash Load and Bank ACH Transfer is free.

Customer Support – Prepaid Cards are notorious for charging fees simply for calling customer support. For the Ready Debit Card, online access is free (as it should be). You get one free live customer support a month, and then the cost will be $2 for each call.

Table Showing Costs and Fees

Verdict – The READYdebit™ Card is a pretty decent prepaid card. What is appealing is that you are not charged any fee for the most common methods of loading the card. You also do not pay any fees as long as you sign when you use the card, and not your pin. The monthly fee for the “basic” version seems reasonable as well.

This card will appeal to those who either just want a card and can’t get a debit card because he or she has very little in a bank account. It will also appeal to those who have poor credit and do not want to carry regular credit card because they had previously got into trouble with it.

However, bear in mind that having a prepaid card does not help you rebuild your credit. If you need to rebuild your credit, then I suggest you get a secured credit card instead.

Snapshot of the Ready Debit Application Page

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 11:56 and is filed under Credit Card Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.