School holidays, Eid-ul-Adha, and Christmas, all is now over and New Year is right in front of us. During this period, I believe, whether you’re single, married, with kids or whatsoever, you’d have spent quite a lot of your income (or future income) to celebrate those festives. Not to mention the expenditure for the preparation of your kids to enroll to a new school season as well.

What is your spending habit? Moderate? Lavish? Or really budget on each items?

In my statement on the first paragraph, I’ve mentioned about spending spree. Keeping track of what we spent on is a wise idea to not waste money in the oncoming shopping spree. There’s a few ways to do this, whether we keep the bills on the items that we spent on, and lump it together with listings on your credit/debit/prepaid cards. Next is to study them, whether we are spending on the unnecessary stuffs or otherwise, whether we had overspent on our credit cards, or whether we had had disappointed our loved ones of not buying some of the stuffs they desired whereas we have had the extra money to make them happy.. Okkk, if we’re on debit/prepaid card, we’d know if we do have that extra money to further spend our money on or not..

Have you heard about debit card or prepaid card? Nope, its not the mobile phone reload prepaid that we’re going to talk about in this article. This debit card or prepaid card work a little bit like credit card, that we can use a card while doing any shopping transaction. However, the principle behind it is not the same. Both debit card and prepaid card requires our own money to exist. It’s like we’re using our own money, but paying with a card instead of money, a move towards a cashless society. In addition to that, since we’re using our own money, we do not incur debt nor will there be any interest rates levied on overdue payments.

Can it be used anywhere anytime?
Many of the debit cards and prepaid cards partner with international retail electronic payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard. Thus, we can use them for online transactions as well as transactions with merchants around the world.

Any requirements?
Application requirements are much less strict than credit cards, since we’re not borrowing money from anyone. There’s no standard salary requirement for this. Almost anyone can apply for it.

What if the card is lost?
Don’t worry, the security works like credit card as well, we can make a phone call to the hot-line immediately to block the card from any further transactions. Thus, it is safe if we’re thinking to use the debit card or the prepaid card.

With these debit cards or prepaid cards, we’re being credit-less, that is we don’t have the tendency to overspend. This would be a beautiful solution for those who finds it difficult to control their spending desire, and at the same time, we’re going cashless. Another benefit on this is that we’d be able to track on the things we spent on, and we can try to limit them rationally. For my case, I’m not totally going on debit card for all my expenditures, and to keep a track would need me to keep all the bills and receipts which can be a messy thing.. But of course, with debit card or prepaid card, we wouldn’t be able to go beyond what we have or to purchase an item under interest-free installment payment plan. Another thing, reward points are typically non-existent or lower compared to credit cards.

So, come on and have a try on these and be cashless. Hehe, making it harder to thieves to steal our hard cold cash in a big amount

Stay tune for comprehensive comparison of debit/prepaid card among banks in Malaysia soon