Citibank Reloadable Debit Card Explained

When you were in college, you noticed that most of your illustrious and affluent classmates rarely carry cash. As in cold cash. So you were contemplating back then, how can these guys afford to eat at expensive restaurants and buy costly items without the power of the good ol’ benjamins?

Or in the United Kingdom’s case, that paper with the Queen’s face on it? And you finally discovered when you started working that they carry a totally different kind of buying power – the plastic type of power or the reloadable debit cards.

Now there are a lot of reloadable credit cards in the market nowadays but the most commonly used and the most popular would be the Citibank reloadable debit card.

These reloadable debit cards are sometimes known as prepaid reloadable debit cards. Now there is a huge difference between a credit card and the Citibank reloadable debit card in the sense that with the reloadable debit card, you can only spend as much as the total amount deposited on the said account as against the credit card which has a credit limit and does not require any account to be stored with money on.

The great thing about Citibank’s reloadable debit cards is that it eliminates the danger of carrying cash around, especially in the urban areas. It can also act as an ATM card the moment a vendor requires cash.

And if the debit card is lost, unless the one who finds it for some astounding reason know your PIN code, your money is safe and all you have to do is report the loss to the bank where you got it from and have it replaced in a jiffy, as opposed to cash wherein if it gets lost, you just have to pray that the person who finds it has a Samaritan heart and would go out of his or her way to search for the rightful owner.

As early as your college days (and that was not so long ago), parents were able to control the expenditures of their children by putting money on these reloadable debit cards the amount that they deem necessary for their kids to be able to survive in school.

Giving them extensions of the regular credit cards will only prove to be unwise for many kids since the purchase power is unlimited. And at the same time, the age eligibility for a credit card, even the extension is 18 years old and above.

To avail of these reloadable debit cards, all you have to do is go online on the Citibank website and search for reloadable debit cards or go directly to any Citibank branch and physically fill up the application form. The application to reloadable debit cards is not as hard as applying for credit cards since the bank is not extending any money to you when you spend.