Secured credit-1st cards-inquiries

[Carolina9]

Hi, I'm new to forums. This week I was approved and received BoA secured $1100 and cap one $500 secured.

I also applied for td regular card where I have accounts and was declined. I also was declined for a discover it student card. I got messages saying they couldn't identify me .

I called both and they said thin files,

I have no previous credit and can't be put as an authorized on anyone's account,

I got access to my experian and it's now showing the account where there was nothing before. Shows only the BoA as an inquiry

Other credit bureaus asked me to send them copies of id before I could get info so I have no idea if I even have a score.

My questions are:

What should the next steps be? Are these two cards ok?

Also, in terms of paying can I get some advice on that. Some are paying multiple times in a month while others say once is enough. I really need simple instructions on that.

I'm really new at credit and don't want to mess this up. I really should have waited before applying to TD and Discover and getting declined but I just wanted somebody to give me a chance.

Thank you.

[Revelate]

Welcome to the forums!

The two cards you have are *perfect*.  Make certain to get the 1-2-3 rewards tacked on to the BOFA secured card.

Your next steps are to use the cards and just to hang out for six months at least, and a year is better.  Once that year passes, you're qualified entry level Chase / Discover / Amex if any of those cards meets your needs and you have the income to support it.

Payment: whatever you feel like; it's traditional to just pay once a month but lenders these days don't really care as long as they get paid.  I'm lazy and don't spend a lot of time managing my cards, so I just pay once a month personally... there are other members that swear by the multi-payment method.  Neither will change your FICO score as long as you make the payment on time.

Everything else is pretty irrelevant at this time, but there's a lot of information on the forums about managing your reported utilization and other topics for improvements to your score over time.

[Carolina9]

Thank you so much! I am looking forward to learning from the forums.