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Prepaid Upside Visa Card For Teens

Posted in Credit Card Deals by CardMogul
March 30, 2009 08:15 PM - 7 Comments

If your teen is heading off to college, here’s a good way to keep them supplied with cash and avoid credit card problems.

The UPside Prepaid Visa card is relatively cheap and allows parents to maintain some control over student spending.

Teens can only spend the amount parents load the card. There’s no way to overdraw the account and rack up big overdraft charges, or incur similar penalties by exceeding a credit card limit.

Online access allows parents to see how much money is available and talk with their kids if spending starts to veer off course.

Unlike many prepaid debit cards there’s no fee to make a purchase, and cash withdrawals from ATMs cost $1.49 (plus the fee from whatever bank you’re using.)

There are two payment options:

Upside Access charges a $4.95 activation fee, a 99 cent monthly membership fee and 99 cents each time you add money from a checking or savings account.

Upside Edge charges an annual membership fee of $24.95, there’s no activation or monthly fees, and loads from checking and savings are free.

(Loads from a credit or debit card are $2.50 each for both cards.)

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Comments (7)
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  1. BloggingBanks said:
    on March 31st at 08:45 am

    That’s not a good deal. Only irresponsible parents would sign up for a card that charges them fees. A much better thing to do is open a card under the kid’s name with the parent as a co-signor. That way your kid builds credit history, and you have a much wider availability of no-cost credit cards..

    Did I mention that I don’t like credit card fees? Paying Annual fees is not a smart thing to do.

  2. CardMaven said:
    on March 31st at 09:30 am

    Blogging Banks: Many parents don’t want to co-sign a credit card for their kids because they’re worried they won’t be responsible with it. They’ll overspend, fail to pay the bill, exceed the credit limit, run up big fees and actually hurt their credit score. This prepaid debit card is like a credit card with training wheels. Much less likely that first spin will result in skinned knees and big battles with kids who are already stressed about being away from home for the first time. Plus, there’s no way that your kid’s bad behavior will come back to hurt the co-signer’s credit score. Is that worth the $25 a year annual fee? Oh yeah.

  3. BloggingBanks said:
    on April 1st at 06:29 am

    CardMaven,

    I strongly doubt that this debit card builds credit history for anyone.
    I still believe that $25 to pay is a lot since it doesn’t teach kids any responsibility. If you are not taught any responsibility by your parents, then your life will be very difficult. If parents kept the $25 and instead taugt their kids what’s right and what’s wrong, a co-signor card would be beneficial in for everyone.
    If they don’t then the $25 is th first drop in the bucket of fees the family is going to pay.

  4. CardMaven said:
    on April 1st at 10:54 am

    Geesh. Do you have any kids?

  5. Carl said:
    on April 7th at 09:39 am

    I cannot believe some parents would prefer to give a credit card to their child just for the sake of saving $25! We all know how that works, they have no annual fee but they make tons of money on the APR….
    By the way, Upside also has an entry level product without ATM access but no annual or monthly fee…This card is by far the best deal out there!

  6. Vicki said:
    on May 1st at 12:50 pm

    They also have an Upside CLEAR plan that is FREE. the only fee is if you load it from a credit card. Otherwise if you load it from a bank account it’s free (it just takes a few days to hit).

  7. Susie said:
    on September 23rd at 07:23 pm

    I believe this is a geat card for my teen, Its better than her running around with my debit card from the bank and having someone rifle through her purse at school and steal the number and wipe out our checking acct. I have to send her to the store and sometimes she forgerts to give me back my card. I am not worried about her building credit yet she will in time. I just want to protect the money I send her to the store with. If I gave her cash she would be more inclined to spend it at school and someone may steal that too. Kids in the schools are sneaky.

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