First Credit Card since Discharge, God I hate this card

[gamblingsucks]

Ive been discharged Ch7 since August and have focused heavily on rebuildig my credit. ive corrected all the things i could on my credit report by myself and even hired Lexington Law to fix the ones I needed help with. My major concern is getting my car refinanced that I had gotten 1 week after discharged. I really had no choice at the time and took a 25% APR loan through Capital One...Hey I really needed a car and I have been paying it for the last 4 months.

In order to get refinancing I know im going to have to show revolving credit besides just paying my car loan on time. Ive tried unsuccessfully to get a department store card or Cap1 or Orchard or anything so I decided to take the scum of scum cards First Premier Bank "Platinum" and I was approved. I know how these cards work and I know there loaded with fees but can someone tell me what to do? I'm just looking to use this card as a stepping stone. How long should I carry this card would maybe 6 months be sufficient then cancel it? Or can I go as low as three months? And what should I keep the credit limit at? I know they start you out at $300 if I always have at least $80 that should help my credit right


Any advice how to handle this demon would be appreciated,


Thanks

[SinkingFast]

We got those offers. I posted about First Premier here:

http://www.bkforum.com/showthread.php?t=10352

If you get the $250 initial LOC, you're gonna owe $178 in fees right off the bat. That's $178 you pay for the priviledge of carrying their card.

If you're gonna spend out money to get Credit, make use of your own money instead of lining the pocket of others. Get some sort of Secured Card that reports to the Credit Bureaus instead.

You might also wanna sign on with a Credit Monitoring company and take a look at your Credit Reports. See what's there. Something may have not been cleaned up that causing you problems.

[jetset]

My discharge was August '06, and I had applied for an orchard bank card, as well as a capital one card...they both denied me. I applied for the First Premier Bank card, was approved and accepted it...as I wrote in SinkingFast's post, it was the price I had to pay. If you can't get an Orchard bank card or a Capital one card...where else can you go besides these dirty lenders like first premier? Within three months of getting my first premier card paid for and reporting to my credit account, I was approved for capital one ($300 limit, now $500) and an Orchard bank ($300 limit, now $400). I just recently (september '07) closed my first premier bank card before they could charge me the annual fee's for the next year, and replaced it with an Apple Itunes visa, $250.00 credit line, and a Target redcard, 200 limit. I also, back in June, was approved for an auto loan with americredit at 12.99%. Had I not got some revolving accounts on my credit report, I may have been paying 25% like you. I'm now going to try to refinance my truck with a new lender at a lower rate. In my opinion, you have to start somewhere...but I would suggest a different lender, like credit one bank...they are the same as first premier bank in the terms of their credit limit and fee...the thing about first premier that drove me nuts was their $7.00 online bill pay fee, and their online banking system was so outdated, I'm talking 90's, and now that I think about it, there was a one-time fee for using online banking. I would check with whatever credit card company about these fee's...you SHOULD NEVER have to PAY A FEE just to PAY THE BILL!!!!!!!

Good luck!

adam

[PaKettle]

Capital One won't give one to you if you filed against them, will they?

I thought there were better ways to get new credit without paying outrageous fees like you mention!

Did you research this? Look for better deals?

[floorman]

I keep reading this but it is not true. I had Capital One and Providan (WAMU) before BK7 and discharged balances (in 2003) on both of them. I was offered and accepted a Cap 1 Visa with a 500 limit within 6 months of discharged. It took WAMU about 9 months to offer a card with a 5500 limit. That was about 3 years ago. Now my Capital One card has a 1000 limit, and the WAMU card has 6500 limit. I also have another WAMU card with 5500 limit. The Capital on card that was discharged still shows on all 3 credit reports. The WAMU shows on 2 of them. They really don't care about previous BK.

[emoney]

That car is really a rip-off, so why did you fall for it?

Too much debt had been the problem for most readers of this forum I wonder why we are so eager to jump back into the fire.

There is a small need for credit in our society. If for no other reason to have a high FICO score for employment and insurance reasons.

To meet this limited need to rebuild the best deal I found was at First National Bank of Ohama which cost $20 a year and requires a $500 deposit. They report to all three CRAs.
regards,
emoney

[nazstar]

I haven't gone through my bankruptcy yet, but 15 years ago, I was in a financial bind. I got all these credit cards when I went away to college and ran them up way beyond what I could pay (at least as a college student making $75 a week). So, they got cancelled. Then my parents couldn't make my tuition payments so the university sent ME to collections for a $25,000 bill. I eventually paid them every penny but it was hard.

When I wanted to rebuild my credit, I went with a providian secured card. I deposited $500 and charged only my groceries on it each month. With every charge, I set aside the cash to pay the bill in a coffee tin. Within 3 years, that card still had my $500 cash deposit but an total line of credit of $9600. I still had a hard time getting approvals for the "good deal cards". But eventually I got there.

This time around, I will do the same thing by having a secured card, when the time comes. But, I will not allow the limits to get so high. When things started going bad for us financially (legal problems), we relied heavily on those cards to bail us out and that's how we got in our current situation. At one point, I had a credit score of 745, and a combined line of $150K on credit cards and an AMEX Gold with an unlimited line. Within 3 years, those were all maxed out and I had a $75K AMEX bill. No way is that EVER happening again! if we didn't have that credit line to fall back on, we would have sought alternatives to our lawsuit and probably giving up chasing smoke in half the time.