R8RDude wrote:
Who would you recommend? I've thought about Orchard Bank, but they have somewhat high annual fee.
I started with scores in low to mid-500s. Started with Credit One, Orchard secured, Juniper, Macys, Bloomingdales, BofA, Target, and National City. Started last August with 0 CCs and progressed from there. The biggest problem I faced was dealing with CCs I didn't want to deal with (Juniper, Credit One, Orchard, and Target), and also being stuck with low limit, high-fee cards.
If I had to start over again, I would save all the $$$ I could and get a large limit secured CC and focus on BofA, Citi, CUs, and other banks and get 2-3 secured cards. Some banks like BofA will return the money after a year anyway. I'd probably then add a store card like Macys to add to the mix.
Getting over that initial hump of low-limit cards is tough. I finally got National City at $2000 with scores in the upper 600s after 9 months. DW was in the same boat and finally got her first $1000 CC from BofA last week after 9 months too. It always made me sick to see people posting in here with a 600 score getting CCs at $10k plus. Large part of that was due to the others at or near $10k limits they had already.