Joshua Heckathorn

The time has come to ditch the old debit card and add a new rewards credit card to your wallet, but how can you be certain you'll get approved for the card you want? Is it even worth your time to fill out the application? I get these questions quite often from readers, and the answer is a simple one. There's absolutely no way to know. However, you can certainly improve your chances of getting a big thumbs up from the credit card company by making sure you know where your FICO credit scores stand before completing a card application. Once you pull your FICO scores and determine where you fall in the bad, fair, good or excellent credit range, you can then make a better decision regarding which credit card offers would be the best fit for your credit profile. Unfortunately, you're not entitled to free FICO scores each year like you are free credit reports, so you may have to settle for an estimate from a site like as CreditKarma if you're not willing to shell out cash for your scores.

If you’re anything like me, your stomach drops when you receive any form of communication from the IRS. That’s because if they’re sending you something in the mail, it's most often because you owe some clams to Uncle Sam. Inevitably, the government finds ways in which to squeeze revenues from as many angles as possible, especially with today’s trimmed public budgets and high government debt. In fact, credit card holders have often been the recipients of such attempts at increasing the public coffers.

The first thing we should clear up in this discussion is the fact that there's no such thing as a "prepaid credit card".  It simply doesn't exist.   If anyone references a prepaid credit card in a conversation with you, what they actually mean is a "prepaid debit card". The terms unfortunately get mixed up all the time, even though "debit" and "credit" mean very different things, but the fact is all of these cards are debit cards.  So now that we've got that confusing point cleared up, let's move onto how these prepaid debit cards work and how they affect your credit scores. Prepaid debit cards are actually quite simple financial products.  They basically work just like a debit card that's linked to your personal checking account, only there's no checking account to worry about.