Payroll Card

See: Payroll Deduction Plan.

Payroll cards are old school: your pay gets loaded onto a card, which you can use to pay for things on machines, or you can go get cash at the ATM. Pretty much like an employer-paid prepaid debit card. They can even be used for auto-bill payments, and you can add more money to it yourself if you want.

There’s no way to log on to your payroll card account, because...that’s kind of the point of payroll cards. They’re ways to pay people (usually lower-income people) who don’t have bank accounts. Workers can get their money just as fast as direct deposit, and employers don’t have to waste money on paper checks.

Since it’s like a debit card, it’s really not good to lose a payroll card...but even then, there’s a process for reporting it lost and getting funds back.

The downside? Maintenance fees, as well as whoopsie-fees, like getting a replacement payroll card and using out-of-network ATMs. All those fees can add up faster than you can say “Where’d my payroll card go?”