You may have been a credit card holder in your past life, but now your credit history is too poor to qualify for a loan or a credit card. What should you do? A prepaid debit card could be your answer. The Vision Premier prepaid card makes the transition from credit card to prepaid card smoothly, by offering quite the list of features and financial tools that will make your life easier. This prepaid card has two cards to choose from. For this review, all fees, charges and features mentioned are for the Vision Premier prepaid debit card with direct deposit.
Every prepaid card has a list of fees and charges the company will issue to you for certain features. Vision Premier's fees are comparable to other prepaid cards, so if you have used a prepaid credit or debit card in the past, they should look familiar. A few of these fees include:
- $9.95 one-time activation fee
- $7.95 monthly fee
- $2.50 ATM fee
You can add funds to your card in a variety of ways, but you can also withdraw funds with the same ease. The Vision Premier prepaid debit card is a Visa card, which means you can extract money from your account at any Visa member bank within the U.S. There happens to be 14,000 of them. You are able to withdraw your max available budget ($2,500) at any of these locations.
There are a few flexible features that will help you to avoid ATM and card fees. Once such feature is text and email alerts. You can sign up for the alerts by accessing your online account. There are around 18 different alerts that you can sign up for, but Vision Premier recommends these three specifically:
Daily Balance – This particular alert will help you avoid ATM balance-inquiry fees by sending you a daily text or email regarding your current prepaid card balance.
Authorization – After each transaction, the text or email will show you specific details about the purchase.
Payment Posted – Each time money is loaded to your card by various means, you will receive an alert that will include how much money was deposited.
Is plastic safer than cash? Vision Premier thinks so, and so do we. The FDIC insures the money on your card up to $250,000. Not only is a prepaid card safer in regards to losing the money, but it is also financially safer. Cash has a way of making its way into our wallets and out again just as quickly. As a cash user, it's hard to keep track of where you spent that money. With Vision Premier, you have an online account where you can track your expenditures, which will help you keep your monthly budget goals. Although many may not classify safety as a feature, we definitely believe it deserves to be in this category. Some of our other favorite features include:
Cash back – Every time you fill up at the pump and use your Vision Premier prepaid debit card, you will get one percent cash back. Vision automatically loads that one percent for gas purchases back onto your card.
Roadside assistance – This service is available to you if you add money to your card at least once a month. Active cardholders can use this service at all hours, nationwide. Although this does not include any kind of towing service, you can call if you run out of gas, lock yourself out of your car, can't start the car, have a flat tire and so forth.
Savings account – If you are an active cardholder, you are eligible to earn a 5.5-percent interest rate and an APY of 5.65 percent. Vision will post your earnings quarterly. You can decide on manual or automatic deposit options, but you must have a minimum balance of $10 transferred from your primary prepaid card account to your new savings account.
Online bill pay – You can pay your rent, utility bills and car payment online or over the phone using this prepaid debit card feature. You are able to set up recurring payments monthly, daily, quarterly or yearly and compensate anyone who accepts Visa debit cards. If your landlord doesn't accept Visa, you can also send a paper check to anyone in the U.S. for free.
Although there may be many features that you can benefit from, you must be an active cardholder to access many of them. Active means that you are loading money onto the card regularly. You can load money onto your card at thousands of locations; here are just a few:
- PreCash
- Visa ReadyLink
- Western Union
- MoneyGram
- ExpressPayment
- PayZone
- Green Dot MoneyPak
- Max load amount is $500.00
- Walmart
- Walgreens
- CVS
The majority of these locations have their own money-loading rules and stipulations. Western Union, for example, will let you load your card 10 times per calendar month, not including direct deposits. And you can only load up to $950 at a time.
You can only have up to $2,500 on your card at one time, unless you are adding money with direct deposit, in which case it can be a smidge over that limit. You can load your card twice a day, with a max up to $2,500, and spend $2,500 per day.
Direct deposit is a fantastic funding option that gives you the freedom to deposit paychecks, government checks and tax refunds.
Vision Premier hosts an extensive FAQs section complete with in-depth answers and picture guides. Our happy feelings towards this prepaid debit card's help and support features end here, however. If you choose the Vision Premier with direct deposit option, you can call and speak to a live agent for free. If you don't need or want the card that has direct deposit options, however, this prepaid card company will allow you to speak with a customer service agent for free up to 30 days, after which it will charge you $1.95 per call. We don't understand why a company would charge its customers for this basic service. This is disappointing, to say the least. You cannot contact Vision via email either.
Vision Premier offers many great features such as cash back on gas purchases, a savings account and online bill pay that will allow you to make purchases whenever and wherever the Visa debit card is accepted. We are disappointed in the help and support that this company offers, but we do feel that the card is simple enough to use that you will probably not need to contact customer support.
