Student Accounts > Guide to Student Credit and Debit Cards

Cards

Unless your bank is in the style of duck-tales and you just pick up your daily allowance of gold each morning you are probably going to need some form of plastic? The two main cards banks tend to offer are debit cards and credit cards; do not get these confused as they are very different.

Credit cards offer the consumer credit believe it or not. This means you purchase your goods using the banks money, whoopee, but then you pay it back to them and if you don’t pay it back quick time they start throwing on interest, d’oh!

My personal recommendation is to steer clear of banks credit cards and go for a credit card company such as egg or capital one. This is of course assuming you really do need one! Credit card companies tend to offer lower interest rates, long interest free periods on balance transfers and interest free periods on new purchases. See below for a list of credit card companies…

Debit cards are simply a way of getting your hands on your money via cash machines or purchasing goods with your money without actually seeing it. The most common forms of debit cards are solo, switch and visa electron. The only problems with debit cards is making sure you choose the most universally accepted card and not all cards are offered by all banks so check that out.

Banking Technology

Also, given our current age of technology and robots, it is good to have internet banking. I would highly recommend going with a bank who offers this, in particular one that allows you to make money transfers online.

Its not hard opening an account and most people find they just upgrade their current account to a student account and don’t even change banks. Just remember the cash incentive and the sexy bank advisor and you can’t really go wrong.