In The New York Times Magazine: The RushCard

SOCIAL CURRENCY
Prepaid cards that cash in on the status of plastic

This week in Consumed:

While recent months have found millions of Americans nervously eyeing their mutual-fund holdings, money-market accounts and credit-card bills, millions of other Americans continue to live their financial lives completely outside this system. Figures vary, but by one widely cited estimate 10 million American households have no bank account. And plenty of businesses sell financial alternatives to the “unbanked” — check-cashing places, for instance. In recent years, another alternative has emerged: instead of converting a paycheck into cash, prepaid cards let users pour it into a piece of branded plastic. Aside from competing on the basis of price (check-cashing fees can be brutal) and convenience (a prepaid card can be used to pay a utility bill online, for instance), at least some of this plastic purports to offer something less quantifiable.

Consider, for instance, the Prepaid Visa RushCard, the product of a partnership between Unifund (a Cincinnati company best known for buying up and collecting on bad debts) and Russell Simmons, a founder of Def Jam records and the Phat Farm apparel brand.

Read the whole column in the November 9, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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