With prepaid credit cards, you get the practicality of plastic while choosing exactly how much debt to charge. By taking charge of your personal financing, you determine your own limits, to the penny, and change them any time you need to.

There are many prepaid credit cards on the market these days, sometimes also labeled pre-funded. They're all reloadable, functioning like a prepaid card for the telephone, and they offer the gigantic benefits of no credit check and no annual interest fees.

Easy to get online or in a store near you, these prepaid credit cards are the wave of the future cashless society. You simply use your own money to buy stuff. That way you're not borrowing from anyone; you're just using plastic instead of cash. And there's no way to get into debt with them...when you run the limit you set, they run out, so you can't overspend even if you want to.

Use your prepaid credit cards almost any place where MasterCard or Visa cards are accepted, without racking up any interest charges whatsoever.

Got kids? A prepaid credit card makes a great instructional tool and present. Buy them one for an initial setup fee (usually from $5-50), and let them pay the smaller fee to renew it when it runs out. Explain that if they let it lapse they have to start all over again with a much larger fee than if they simply renewed in a timely manner. Suddenly, your kids become financially responsible!

Pre-funded cards are not a bad way to keep your own finances in line either. Just come up with the initial scratch and you're on your way to enjoying the ease and flexibility of plastic again!