Hi everyone!

[Layla55]

Hope all are well. It’s coming up on the one year mark for my filing date. Time sure passes. Credit building going fine. I had meijer store card first, then Target, I also have mission lane, ollo, mercury MasterCard that gave me a 2,000 credit limit the most of any. All pretty subprime but no annual fees. I’m being very good and never put anything over 200-300 on cards at one time. That would have been 2-3 thousand in my past. It’s a hard lesson but I am forever changed .

[justbroke]

Store department cards, especially those with a balance, are not generally good for your FICO score. They are listed as "retail cards" in the scoring models. While having one or two should be okay to have in your portfolio, having multiple retail "finance" cards with balances will hurt your score. I would wait 6 months, keep payments on time, revolve no more than 9% of the credit limit, and then try for an unsecured mid-prime card (maybe Cap One) or a local credit union.

At least, that's what I have learned.

[shipo]

Hey Layla55, thanks for the update. I am a bit behind you as I am now six-months post-discharge (Chapter 13) and haven't taken the plunge into any unsecured credit yet. That said, I did try using a CapOne Secured Card, however, the $1,000 line of credit was just not workable for me causing me, as often as not, to use my debit card instead.

After paying off and closing the CapOne account and chucking the card in the trash after less than two months, I went and got another secured card from my bank with a $5,000 limit, and that is working out MUCH better in that I can use it for all of my normal monthly expenses (which typically range between two and three grand). To avoid the whole aspect of having a high debt to credit percentage reported to the credit bureaus, I pay it off just before the statement is cut each month. When reporting time comes around for my bank to tell the credit bureaus what my balance is, it typically shows a hundred or two worth of charges which hadn't yet cleared before I made my payment, but had cleared before the statement was cut (my bank has a 4-day window between the "due" date and the "statement" date).

So far at least, my credit rating has not suffered the cancellation of the CapOne card as that ding seems to have been offset by the new card and the low utilization percentage which has been reported by my bank; going forward I'm hoping for a gradual bump. Time will tell.