Private Label Credit Card

Vanity plates. You see them on car license plates. You see them on toothy grilles. You note the engraved backplates of early iPhones. All about marketing...whatever it is you wanna market.

So when you have a private label card, you're usually extending the financial reach of a large company that is hoping to have you in their thoughts...even when you're not directly using their product.

Southwest, Disney, and a bunch of other big consumer brands have these cards. They work like any other card, only...a bit worse. Unless you actually use their frequent flyer miles or points toward trips between Phoenix and San Jose, or for partial room upgrades at the Disney Orlando WonderWorld Hotel.

The cards carry the logos of the brands. They carry interest charges if you don't pay them off each month. They carry an annual fee. And in real life, usually when a brand has issued these cards, they were first approached by a big bank that wanted to use their happy brand names to extend the bank's credit reach. Banks make a fortune issuing credit cards, so they like having them...out there. Citi backs MasterCard; so does Wells; B of A is more of a Visa place. But the money is all green, and it's likely that the bank will have paid Disney or Southwest a bounty of, say, $100 for each card that those big brands can sell.

Remember that the next time you're standing in line for the Star Wars ride and some seller hits you up to buy a Disney card. The Force is not necessarily with you. The bills, however, will be.