Getting credit when you have bad credit honestly isn’t easy. I know from personal experience. It wasn’t that long ago that my credit was trashed. I couldn’t get a line of credit to save my life. I couldn’t get credit cards and I couldn’t get loans (actually I couldn’t even get a cell phone or satelite dish to tell you the truth).
I did a lot of research back then because honestly, I didn’t know where to turn and I was starting to get desperate. I knew that I would never be able to buy a home or a car unless I got things turned around. After a few months, I found a simple way to get started. I discovered that secured credit cards are available to almost everyone. For a while, I resisted taking one out because I didn’t want to pay the fees – I was in denial of how bad the situation was. After a while I was finally honest with myself and decided to take out a couple secured cards.
My Experience Using Secured Credit Cards For Bad Credit
I took out two cards and made on-time payments for a few months. After I had made a few on-time payments, I started to get credit card offers in the mail. I honestly am not sure whether I could have gotten approved for those cards because I didn’t try – I simply didn’t believe that card companies would approve me at that point. So I waited…
After about three more months, I decided to apply for one of those card offers and was really surprised when I discovered that I was approved. I had of course made six on-time payments on two different cards by that point. From that point forward, I haven’t had any problems getting credit cards.
This all was of course only possible because I committed to myself that I would never make a late payment. I have paid every single one of my credit card bills on-time for the last few years, with no exceptions. In reality it doesn’t hurt your credit unless you’re 30 days late but I refuse to let myself mess around with it. I make my payments on time.
Something that a lot of people don’t know is that you don’t have to pay off the full amount each month to get a benefit. As long as you stay below 30% of your available credit, it doesn’t affect your credit at all. The most important thing after that is simply making a payment each month – on time.
Those two secured cards got the ball rolling for me, even though my credit was terrible. I’m just glad that I was able to find out about them.
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