I had not used any credit at all for about 16 years. I was divorced in 2005 and it crushed my credit. I paid off my house and made no purchases on credit. I stumbled upon Discover's free FICO score page. Spun it up and got a 708 and offers for the IT card. I have a very good salary along with substantial savings. I had a little bit of credit PTSD so I wanted to have cash on hand for anything I wanted to buy.
I thought it might be nice to have a credit card to do car rentals so I applied for the IT card. I was a little surprised at the instant approval and the 12K credit limit. After reading this forum and the ones on Reddit I caught the bug and applied for an AMEX BCP. I was approved after an identity verification phone call but for only a 1K CL. Trying to be an optimist I thought I would only use it for groceries, gas and some streaming services.
I read about all the love NFCU gets so I transferred some money into an account there and looked into some cards. It seems they pull TU. My free TU score came in at 645. Good Lord! My Experian is 745 up from 708 at the end of June. So I did not pull the trigger on applying for a card there. I have a longstanding relationship with USAA so I decided to apply for the Unlimited 1.5% cash back Preferred Signature Visa. I thought it would be a nice card to fill the gaps of my other cards but I wasn't expecting an approval based on my recently approved apps. If I got denied I would cool my jets and wait 6 months to a year before I applied again. I was pleasantly surprise to be instantly approved for the card with a 15k limit. This has satisfied my card "jones" for a while))) 3 for 3. Not bad considering where my credit came from.
FICO update: I just checked my Experian credit score and it is up to 778. It was 708 when I applied for the Discover IT card a few weeks ago.
