The Reddit person is incorrect. We have plenty of use case scenarios here leading to graduation. People have paid in full and gotten an early graduation. The thing to remember is that despite what people post, graduating early is not the norm. The secured program is 12 months. Some will graduate early while others, like myself, graduate later. In my situation, I didn't pay my full minimum payment. Simply forgot to pay something like $12 while waiting for my rewards to post. Payment was only a few days late, but the damage was done. It caused me to graduate much later and I didn't get the full $2200 limit.
@MikeyMagic wrote:
@Brian_Earl_Spilner wrote:The Reddit person is incorrect. We have plenty of use case scenarios here leading to graduation. People have paid in full and gotten an early graduation. The thing to remember is that despite what people post, graduating early is not the norm. The secured program is 12 months. Some will graduate early while others, like myself, graduate later. In my situation, I didn't pay my full minimum payment. Simply forgot to pay something like $12 while waiting for my rewards to post. Payment was only a few days late, but the damage was done. It caused me to graduate much later and I didn't get the full $2200 limit.
Thanks for your experience and your belief that not showing a balance on a statement will delay graduation. That didn't make sense to me because obv Discover can see how you are using the card, if there are late payments, returned payments etc...
What limit did they finally give you if you don't mind me asking and how long did it take for you to graduate?
I don't remember how long. Maybe 14 months or something like that. I only got 750 on a 500 deposit. Huge mistake.
In my caseI let balances report the 4 of the 7 months prior to going from$400 secured to $1800 unsecured. I do think reported balances help with Discover CLIs however after the card is unsecured. I only got approved for another CLI when I requested after both reporting a more significant balance (was $500 on the $1800 limit) and the next AR (account review) discover did following that reported balance. If you request a CLi via the Discover site it's a soft pull, so no harm if you are denied, however it does appear the internal data they use is from your last AR. If you pull your reports from annualcreditreport you'll see the that AR in your soft pulls (you probably won't see this when you look at your reports from other sources, these are usually more detailed). For me that AR was about 2 months after letting the balance report.
Take "expert" answers with a grain of salt. Multiple experts will frequently give you different answers.
I've never had a secured card, so I do not claim to have expertise in this area. I have read (from Discover, if I'm not mistaken) that secured accounts are evaluated at the 7th month and every month thereafter to determine whether or not to graduate them to unsecured. I think multiple people here on this forum graduated a little earlier than that, like 6 months or whatever.
EQ8 778, TU8 763, EX8 769 as of May 14