Key to maximizing the value of your free ticket is to be sure it’s as close to free as possible, so try to pay off most or all of your balance each month. If you’ve been a good customer to your credit card, give them a call and ask for a lower interest rate or a reduction on your annual fee…many times they’ll honor the request if your track record with them is sound.
There are times when a card with a larger annual fee is advantageous. Often, higher annual fee cards accumulate larger rewards. In the case of mileage cards, no annual fee cards generally earn at a rate of 1 point/mile per dollar spent but annual fee cards often earn twice that.
Think of an annual fee as an investment: if an annual fee is $70, that’s about 15-20% the value of an airline ticket, so you’d need to earn a ticket faster than 5-7 years to make that pay off. Look at your credit card spending from last year: was it more than $5,000? If it was, and you paid the balances off each month, the annual fee (if doubling your points/miles earning potential) is worth it.
Advantages of Prepaid Credit Cards For those who do not have enough credit history or have had it blemished, prepaid credit cards are an effective way to build or slowly rebuild credit. That may not happen immediately, but it is something to rcbalance work on over time. The banks that issue prepaid credit cards are also prepared to extend normal credit the moment you are able to show that you have become a worthy credit risk.For the moment, you may have to make do with prepaid credit cards. You can use prepaid credit cards as you would any other regular credit card to purchase airline tickets, reserve hotel rooms, or order items online.
Prepaid Credit Card for Students There is a special prepaid Visa credit card for students, which offers a lot of convenience not only for the students but also for their parents. These reloadable prepaid credit cards offer parents several options on how to reload. Parents can add money to reloadable prepaid credit cards by depositing money, by arranging an automatic transfer of funds from their account (a deposit account or their own credit card account), or by online transfer. Using the prepaid Visa credit card is no different from giving the regular allowance to their child, only they do so by electronic means and there is no more cash that changes hands.
The big advantage of the prepaid Visa credit card is that the student is limited to spend only as much money as there is in the card. The parent is thus able to control to some extent the spending behavior of their child. They can use the prepaid credit card anywhere that the credit card brand is acceptedPrepaid Credit Cards as Gift Certificates Some prepaid credit cards function like gift certificates. You buy the prepaid credit card for a certain amount, and your recipient can purchase items with it at any of the brick-and-mortar stores or online merchants, and also for mail order items, that accept the particular credit card brand. Your recipient can use the prepaid credit card only up to the amount of money that you loaded on it. This particular version of prepaid credit cards is non-reloadable.