Finally starting my quest of getting credit cards... How long might this take?

[Anonymous]

A little bit of background:

• My credit scores are stated in my signature.
• I have a lot of student loans.
• I do not have an auto loan or a mortgage
• I just got my first credit card ever in November-- the DCU secured card.
• After just one month with the DCU card I started getting approved at least for higher-interest unsecured cards pretty easily--I applied for a total of seven different cards in January and was approved for every single one of them. That said, all those inquiries damaged my score by about 35 points versus where it was.
• The full list of cards I now have is: DCU Secured Visa, PayPal Bill Me Later (does not report to bureaus), Amazon.com Store Card, Amazon.com Rewards Visa, Old Navy Visa, Sears Mastercard, Target REDcard, Kohl's Card

With all this said, let's say I want to get Discover It, Chase Freedom, a decent no-fee AMEX card, or some other general-purpose credit card that isn't egregious on the interest like the retail cards always are. Let's say that I also don't just want to be approved--I want to be approved for an APR lower than 16%. Let's also say that my income is unfortunately rather low; only around $25k per year right now.

Given these criteria, would anyone hazard a guess about how long I should wait before I try applying for one of the cards listed above?

[TravisD]

Prime lenders don't like seeing people with a 3 month history, I would personally wait atleast a year. Your scores are on point, but its the lack of history you're going to have an issue with and after a year those 7 inq's won't affect your score. 

[Wolf3]

13 months.

[firstladyd]

+1 on 13 months.

[dodgerslv]

I agree with everyone...wait at least a year for those new accounts to mature. It is known that prime lenders like Chase would want to see at least a year of credit history with one or more major credit cards for them to consider you. See if its possible to add more funds to your secured DCU credit card. And any GE back card (Amazon) is generous with CLI (every 4 months or so). They will always be a SP so no harm in trying to increase the limit on that one.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice, everyone.

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@dodgerslv wrote:

See if its possible to add more funds to your secured DCU credit card. And any GE back card (Amazon) is generous with CLI (every 4 months or so). They will always be a SP so no harm in trying to increase the limit on that one.

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I've seen this mentioned about GE in other threads. Old Navy's cards (and the other Gap brands) are all GE-backed too. I've thought about applying for an American Eagle or JCP card because they are also issued by GE and it might make it easier to game the CLIs if I have four GE-issued cards. I'd probably be approved, but I don't want to damage my credit score further by getting another HP so soon. I also don't shop in those stores very often, which makes the actual value of the card (beyond simply having another card) rather low, especially the JCP card since they don't offer a Visa or MC version that I could keep active by using it elsewhere.

I can add money to my DCU card, although unless/until I get a new job it may be difficult to find the cash in my budget to do much with it. I was originally approved for a $2,600 limit but asked them to decrease it to $500 because I didn't have that much cash to put into the deposit.

[scientifics]

I agree that you should wait a year. With all those INQs and a short history, I feel like you will just get denials from the cards you are aiming for. Just make sure to use your cards responsibly and when you go to apply in a year, make sure your UTIL on each card isn't too high.