Rich Barber of Lower Saucon Township, Pa., got his tax refund on a prepaid card and now wishes he hadn’t because it took him a while to figure out how to get his money without paying fees.

Keep his situation in mind if you choose to use a prepaid card in lieu of a bank account for managing your money. They work similar to a bank account in that you can deposit your paycheck, tax refund or other payment on the card and then use it to spend the dough. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be free from fees and deciphering account terms.

Last year, nearly $100 billion was expected to be deposited on them, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is proposing the first industry-wide regulations for the cards to ensure users are protected.

Barber’s refund came on an E1 Visa Prepaid Card, which is administered by EPS Financial in Easton, Pa. The card came with a term booklet that explained the fees.

He would be charged 75 cents every time he bought something at a store by keying in his PIN as you would with a debit card. He would be charged $2.50 for every withdrawal from an ATM. If he cashed in the card at a bank, he’d be charged 1.5 percent of the transaction amount.

Barber could use the card in other ways, too, without being charged a fee. But his terms booklet didn’t list them.

The booklet provided with the card is designed to disclose fees the user might encounter and doesn’t list transactions without fees, said Jessica Lynch, client services manager and recruiter for EPS Financial.

Additional information is available online or by calling customer service, which Barber did.

Lynch said EPS Financial previously included all of the information with the card, plus a phone number cardholders could call to learn how to use the card without incurring fees. But when that number wasn’t used much, it was discontinued this year.

“We intend to reinstitute that information on the cardholder agreement next year as we have in the past,” Lynch said.

The no-cost options for using the card include signing for a purchase at a store as you would with a credit card, instead of entering a PIN. You also can transfer $2,000 from the card to a bank account every 30 days at no charge.

Barber’s daughter transferred $2,000 for him in April, but that still left him with a balance of several thousand dollars, meaning it would take him another two months to drain the card that way.

Barber plans to close his account, a process that is explained in his terms booklet. A cardholder who closes an account receives a check for the balance, at no charge. That takes 30 days.

Fees are common on prepaid cards. But how much the cards charge and what they charge for varies, according to a survey last month by bankrate.com.

About one-quarter of 31 cards surveyed had no monthly fee and one-quarter will waive the monthly fee if a specific amount is deposited on the card.