Do you suffer from vertigo (or, more correctly, acrophobia: a fear of heights)? If so, you should probably avoid creating a mental picture of a graph derived from Mercator Advisory Group's projections for prepaid card usage in the U.S. There's a real danger you could get a dizzy spell, and bump your head on the x-axis. Mercator reckons that $28.6 billion was loaded onto prepaid cards in 2009. It expects that figure to top $201.9 billion next year.

***

Yet that (comparison shopping) is precisely what consumers don't do, or very rarely, according to yet another April report on prepaids, this time from the Pew Health Group's Financial Security Portfolio. Pew's research was based on a series of focus groups comprising prepaid users, which were conducted last November in Houston and Chicago. It found: 'Few participants comparison shop for a prepaid debit card. Most picked whichever one was convenient or recommended to them.' That could be an expensive mistake.

Read the full article at foxbusiness.com.