Bank of America Secured vs Sub Prime Unsecured (Premier, Tribute, Orchard)

[Anonymous]

Would a BoA Secured card be better in the short term than one of the Sub prime cards? Maybe both? My FAKO's from BoA Privacy Assist are Eq-567, Ex-573,Tu-573 as of 3/7/08. I did receive a few pre-approved cc offers from First-Premier and Tribute. Tribute was offering a cl of $500 so i thought about it. My thinking on the Boa card is that I've been a customer of Boa for about 10 yr's and they say that depending on payment history they could later offer an unsecured cc which would be cool. Any thought's opinions?

Thanks,

JR

[haulingthescoreup]

Lord have mercy, yes--if you can get a BofA secured (or partially secured) card, that would be infinitely better than buying new credit from Premiere, Tribute, or Orchard. And that essentially is what all these fees are for: these sub-primes allow you to rebuild your credit in exchange for big, big fees.

If you can get one of the BofA's, you can vault right over the others.

If you haven't read about it already, you can't apply directly for the partially secured card (we call it the 99/500 here: deposit $99 and get a $500 CL.) To get it, you apply for the Plat Visa, I think it is, and they counter-offer with the 99/500, or possibly the fully secured card.

At any rate, with either of them, 9 months to a year of good payment history will graduate you to an unsecured card, and you keep the history. Hard to beat! Good luck.

[nicemann]

I started with the BoA secured card back in Sept 2006.  I currently am at $7,500 unsecured.  Here in about another month I can probably be $10,000+.  I had (well almost gone now) a lot of bad stuff on my reports and they gave me a chance.  I would recommend their card to anyone.