@vish1 wrote:
@Revelate wrote:
BOFA best.
NFCU excellent if you can gain access.
USBank has rewards
SDFCU has rewards. Not many people have it but it looks really good compared to most. Worth checking out.
Not sure how many other secured cards offer a rewards package beyond those. Likely some from various CU's.I am sure you know better than me, but AFAIK, BofA won't give a secured card to the OP with his history. IMHO, BofA will just be a wasted inquiry.
Heh, I don't know that I know better than you, but I was just listing options. BOFA anecdotally will approve with unresolved tax liens and open collections I know from personal experience.
A lot of our BOFA information is outdated; they along with Chase and Amex threw everything out the window last year in a rush to get more credit cards into the field. Unlike Chase / Amex though, BOFA doesn't get nearly the same number of applications on this forum so it's hard to pull out the more relevant data especially for secured cards.
I don't think an inquiry when trying to establish positive credit is ever wasted; there's always tradelines which don't check credit at all that one can resort to if the top tier ones don't pan out. Really if I were doing this all over again I might've gone straight down the list until I found 3 lenders that said yes. Inquiries are pointless after a year (poor play on words, they don't count against you FICO-wise after a year), and gone in two. When building, that 12 month period is about the right time to try to make the jump to the solid unsecured cards, and if your file is mostly resolved by that point, there's not many cards you can't get approved for at the two year mark at least in the current market.
That's why I think the SDFCU card may well be simply excellent: I haven't looked at their rewards program (no idea what one FlexPoint actually gets you), but no credit check either for CU membership (!) and no credit check for the secured card.
Hard to do better than that for $0 AF, rewards, no forex, EMV chip, with a low APR even on a secured card. I may go pick one up as my balance carrying card post mortgage... if it were unsecured witih those stats we'd likely be all over it. Really it may even be better than BOFA especially if you go overseas or have foreign currency transactions, but the 1-2-3 rewards package is uberalis in this credit strata especially for the vast majority of spenders and their graduation policy.
