Capital One Secured Card

[burin4life]

In my opinion Capital One Secured Card is a joke. I have been trying to rebuild my credit and was approved for a secured card. Well I opened up the account over a year ago and have been paying the hole balance every month. Today I called them and asking with my payment history can I now graduate to a unsecured card. They told me no we no longer do that. So now screw paying the whole balance I am now going to pay half.

[Revelate]

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@burin4life wrote:

In my opinion Capital One Secured Card is a joke. I have been trying to rebuild my credit and was approved for a secured card. Well I opened up the account over a year ago and have been paying the hole balance every month. Today I called them and asking with my payment history can I now graduate to a unsecured card. They told me no we no longer do that. So now screw paying the whole balance I am now going to pay half.

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Cap One hasn't graduated in recent memory, that is pretty well known honestly.  Credit building isn't about graduation at all, it's about getting age on accounts and payment history to go along with a sufficient number of tradelines.

Graduation really is way down the list of priorities on a secured credit card in my estimation, and C1 is one of the better secured products out there: can artificially goose your limits by additional deposits without a HP up to 3K which is a good CL for future approvals, and doesn't report as secured either.  All in all, unless you have access to USAA (as a full member) or NFCU, it's one of the two default secured cards I recommend to anyone, the other being BOFA secured.  

You don't have to solve everything in a single secured card, and it's to your advantage anyway to have multiple tradelines from a FICO perspective, so just get another which offers the graduation benefit if you so desire... or start looking at unsecured credit now that you have a year of positive history.

[jsucool76]

Even though you might be upset with Cap1 for not doing a graduation, they still do offer a lot of cards for limited to average credit history. So if you're looking for an unsecured card they may just be your best bet. 

[Wolf3]

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@burin4life wrote:

In my opinion Capital One Secured Card is a joke. I have been trying to rebuild my credit and was approved for a secured card. Well I opened up the account over a year ago and have been paying the hole balance every month. Today I called them and asking with my payment history can I now graduate to a unsecured card. They told me no we no longer do that. So now screw paying the whole balance I am now going to pay half.

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   Not paying the whole balance each month runs up interest charges, that punishes you not them.

  Capital One secured card doesn't graduate and hasn't for years.   They expect you to apply for unsecured card when your credit improves.   Suggest you try the prequalify on the web site and see what they offer.   Apply for one of those if you like them.  Rebuilding can take several years.   Depending on your negatives, you may need more time before you get an unsecured time.    

[apandabear]

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@burin4life wrote:

So now screw paying the whole balance I am now going to pay half.

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They won't upgrade your card. Okay, I can understand your frustration there. I had zero credit cards before I got 2 USAA secured cards. USAA has never graduated their secured cards. Probably never will. The reason I opted to go this route was to build positive history on multiple tradelines.

Not paying your full balance is only going to cost you money and points on your FICO. The interest rate on those cards is terrible, and carrying a high balance on your card will hurt your util, and make you look risky to Capital 1 and any other lender that looks at your credit.

I can see that you're upset but... What are you trying to accomplish? Maybe you could app for a different Cap 1 card? Or another card? Some unsecured card?

If your credit isn't good enough for an unsecured card, maybe you should spend more time with the secured.