Capital One Secured Card Just Won't Upgrade

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

The first thing I had asked from them was the new terms and conditions to re-review it, looking for any changes to the previous terms, and nowhere did it say that graduating the card as unsecured would make the account ineligible to grow. I have no regrets with my decision. I'm in the garden so I'm not applying either for any new card till next April.

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I'd be surprised if the secured card when you got it said it would have endless CLIs.  Their secured cards and starter limit cards are marketed to rebuilders and those without credit who can't get cards easily elsewhere.  No annual fee on the secured card is a great feature compared to the predatory lenders.  Also surprises me that you would care about a CLI on a card you likely will never put a charge on, since you have other cards that earn rewards better.

You say you're in the garden, why is that?  Is it because you want a competitor brand's credit product?  If so, another reason Capital One has no reason to CLI you from a subprime card to a higher limit (that you likely will never put a charge on).  Can't fault Capital One for that.

I think Capital One is wise to not allow people to turn entry tier cards into prime cards -- it makes sense to me and I'm not a bank or a lender.  They're helping people learn to manage credit, and part of being able to afford to take those risks is to be able to find investors who will buy collateralized debt for subprime FICO scores.  The only other way to make money on folks with junk credit or new credit is...$7/month fees and huge APRs and annual fees like the predatory lenders.

So Capital One did it differently.  I'm thankful they did, and that they're forgiving, and that they help a lot of people build credit history responsibly.

I certainly won't rage quit a lender over a lack of an entry level card from ever appreciating in value.

If it matters, I know maybe a dozen people who have had $300 limit credit cards for 20 years and are fine with it and quite happy with them.  "What would I ever need $2000 on a credit card?" isn't that uncommon.

If Capital One no longer offers a product valuable to you, you won't app for it.  They know this.  Upgrading you to a higher limit card you will never use has no value to Capital One or their investors.  If they give you a $10,000 limit on a card you will never use, they need the collateral to back up that credit limit that you won't return a penny on when other borrowers will.

Smart move on Capital One, in my opinion.  

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

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transfered. If they could give me a savor card I would use that. I do not want to have to open up another card which they said I could do, simply because then I would be over 5/24 and i'm almost past that period now and I want to be able to get the chase freedom unlimited or downgrade my csp after a year or two (i forgot the terms) and then apply for the CSR so I can get their rewards also.

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It isn't in their interest to help you get the Savor AND the CSR, so there's no reason for them to do it.  Banks are jealous enough, they want all your swipes.  Chase is weird, though, in that they also want to penalize other banks and prevent people from apping them.  If anything, your frustration should be with Chase's ridiculous 5/24 policy and not Capital One's refusal to PC a starter card into a prime card that is BRAND NEW.  They're not PCing Ventures or QuickSilvers into Savors either, as far as I know -- the Savor is just too new.  Maybe that'll change in 3-6 months.

If you want the CSR, get it and then get the Savor after since 5/24 doesn't matter to Capital One.

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They wouldn't know about the CSR intent (referring to cap).

They wouldn't offer to do anything to do I asked if they can simply make it a normal platinum card and then a year later or so I would look to upgrade it into another quicksilver card and ask if they could combine the limits and close out the old quicksilver and use the old card so this way I keep the limit and the age. I would figure cap would want all my swipes which is why I kind of would assume they'd want to change a card I don't use into something I may use. A venue, a quicksilver, or anything really just something with more use than  0 anything card.

[Anonymous]

They absolutely know about the CSR -- all credit lenders know about the competition and what their customers are likely to qualify for.

Remember, Capital One soft pulls your reports.  They see all our reports.  They log when we get new accounts and what our likely scores were.  They can infer when other folks with similar reports will be considering new cards elsewhere.  They know about 5/24.  These are hundreds of millions of dollars of investor money sitting on the sidelines needing to be put to use.

The problem with the ideas you propose is that you agreed to a contract -- and so did they.  IF they collaterize subprime debt (and they do), then their contracts with the very investors who gave them money to hand over to you back then may say they CAN'T change the terms of that particular account.  Those very collateralization agreements may prevent it and they can't tell you.

Note: I've bought collateralized debt (namely after the housing market crashed when mortgages were literally 6 cents on the dollar) and the terms and conditions of those investment packages make a credit card agreement look like a 3rd grade handwriting lesson.  Capital One can't lend out billions without investors providing liquidity and capital for them -- they can't renege on agreements that cover whatever accounts are under an obligation's umbrella. 

So you are stuck with a card you can't use, and Capital One reminds you over and over again that you can apply for a new card -- they say this to protect their agreements with the people who provided you money, and they say this because they know you are a likely candidate to holding out for a card from a lender who looks at new accounts or new inquiries with a frown.  Capital One generally doesn't do that (they do have the 6 month rule), but they are fully aware of it and their analysis of markets tells them they should hold to these standards.

I know it sounds easy for them to just provide a permanent upgrade path with a given product, but that's not how things work.  There are many players behind the scenes and all of them have their hands in the pot.  You're just the consumer -- consumers are easier to come by than subprime investors will to lose everything over a measly 28% interest rate.  

[Anonymous]

I'm in the garden to age my existing accounts. Not for any other reason at all.  I wanted to grow Capital one because, no. 1, it's my oldest trade line, so it helps my profile if that account grew even just a bit, no. 2: I wanted to optimize the cash back rewards since it was PC'd to Quicksilver, so I wanted to use it more. Honestly, If I knew better then, and had I known about bucketing then,  I'd probably had opted to apply for secured cards which offers growth post graduation like Discover or BofA. It seemed to be the best and most convenient option at the time since I was banking with them.

[Anonymous]

Many other lenders have pathways especially for older accounts like mine.

As far as chase I was actually over 5/24 but I had a targeted offer which I assume bypasses 5/24. So if anything to capital one I couldn’t have just left to go to a better chase card.

[Anonymous]

I disagree on principle with this statement

Getting mad at a bank over a low limit card seems unreasonable to me, mostly because there was a reason you only deserved a low limit card at some point and you were probably thankful they took a risk on you at all.

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If its my oldest account, is stuck at 200-500, is a drop in an ocean of available credit, and because of where i STARTED it stays in that spot forever?  Id drop it too, because thats utter BS.  Being "thankful" ends around the time you cross 700.  At that point its competition for YOUR business not theirs, and quite frankly, Cap One has taken a dump on a lot of its older members.

Me?  Ill graduate out, I am post-november 2016 and have grown leaps and bounds.  I have zero doubt i will be unsecured within the next 4-6 months, but I am 100 percent sure I am going to have product combine to get out of this low tier and into where I should be in terms of limits.

Graduate - PC to QS1, combine the two QS1s into one card with combined limits, and apply for something else.

Ill be damned if im dropping my longest open tradeline for nothing.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I'm in the garden to age my existing accounts. Not for any other reason at all.  I wanted to grow Capital one because, no. 1, it's my oldest trade line, so it helps my profile if that account grew even just a bit, no. 2: I wanted to optimize the cash back rewards since it was PC'd to Quicksilver, so I wanted to use it more. Honestly, If I knew better then, and had I known about bucketing then,  I'd probably had opted to apply for secured cards which offers growth post graduation like Discover or BofA. It seemed to be the best and most convenient option at the time since I was banking with them.

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This.  Discover It Secured in a heartbeat if I could do March 2017 all over again.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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This.  Discover It Secured in a heartbeat if I could do March 2017 all over again.

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I think the Discover It Secured is a better product, for sure.  But it does have tighter underwriting standards as people have been denied for it versus Capital One which has many data points of re-approving someone who charged off an account with them in the past year or two!

Capital One is just known as a weird lender with a variety of internal tiers for their products, from super subprime to subprime to fresh credit to prime.  If you fall into a category with a new application on that card, you tend to stay there.  It's neither positive nor negative until you decide which it is for you.  For me, I got the Discover card before getting the Capital One card and they did prequalify me for an unsecured Platinum as well as a secured Platinum.  Why did I go the secured route?  Because a $3000 credit limit secured looks better on my profile than a $300 toy card.

I assume my secured card will graduate, some day, but I am not in a rush nor do I care either way.  I needed my 3 credit cards, I didn't want predatory fees, and even with FICO8s in the 550s (or maybe worse, who knows as I didn't check until March) and at least 2 past chargeoffs, Capital One welcomed me back, gave me a chance to prove myself, and I'm pretty darned thankful they did it.

I also know that if they do graduate it, it likely won't go anywhere.  I didn't even get a 5 month "credit steps" CLI on that one (possibly because I maxed out the deposit?), so once it graduates I'll try to PC it and after I acquire better cards I'll combine the limit into another Capital One card that I can use.  The Platinum and QS1 get almost no usage other than Spotify and a few tiny autopays for usage.

I personally don't care about the oldest account thing here -- for me, the difference is nothing.  I'm sure for a lot of rebuilders, it's probably less than 6 months of extra aging, and even if you close it today, you still get 10 more years out of it, so it's not a rational decision to keep it open if you're unhappy with it.  I'd prefer to park that $3000 in an ETF or bitcoin or something, sure, but it isn't really bugging me that it's just sitting there doing nothing for me for now.

If they never graduate it, I'll close it after I've gotten my next 3 unicorns which I don't expect for another year or so.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

I'm in the garden to age my existing accounts. Not for any other reason at all.  I wanted to grow Capital one because, no. 1, it's my oldest trade line, so it helps my profile if that account grew even just a bit, no. 2: I wanted to optimize the cash back rewards since it was PC'd to Quicksilver, so I wanted to use it more. Honestly, If I knew better then, and had I known about bucketing then,  I'd probably had opted to apply for secured cards which offers growth post graduation like Discover or BofA. It seemed to be the best and most convenient option at the time since I was banking with them.

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This.  Discover It Secured in a heartbeat if I could do March 2017 all over again.

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Agreed. I was fairly new to the credit game, and did not know what my options were at the time. Had I not received an email from Capital One inviting me to apply for the secured card, I'd still be living off and paying all my bills through my Debit card. But, had I only took the time, I would have explored the world of unsecured cards first and would have done more research prior to making a decision. Since I was already banking with Capital One, I thought it would be a convenient for me to do so, since they already have a history of the money that goes into my account. But I have branched out since starting with Capital One and have now added quite a few tradelines this year, Discover and Amex, both of which have grown quite favorably to warrant more usage. And I have not stopped using my CapOne when It was still open. But I cannot keep inconveniencing myself of using and paying it off, just to keep my limit monitored. Just like a tree, you kill the branch that doesn't grow, otherwise, it prevents the entire tree from expanding and growing better branches. 

[Anonymous]

Totally agree -- and unnecessary cards need to be chopped off.  With the exception of a card that might truly be your oldest card.

My oldest card is from a local unknown bank that's 63 months old.  Secured.  With all my other cards, it went 120D late and should have been charged off but for some strange reason it didn't.  So when I went to rehab it once my income came back (I didn't lose my job, I just ended up having a massive 6 month delay in my check coming in and back then I only got paid twice a year in huge lump sums!), I paid it off and it was my only card.  They kept it open and let me use it.

Fast forward a few years and I decided to try to goodwill saturate them.  100s of letters, emails, faxes, singing clowns and banner planes in the sky and they decided to clean the payment history completely.  From lots of 120D lates to "paid as agreed" for the full 63 months.

Since it's my truly oldest account that's open, I decided to just keep it open.  Eventually I'll close it.  It gets about $20 a month in automatic charges from my bus fare account, and automatically push $15 from Chase every two weeks.  I currently have a "positive" credit of $18.32 or something there.  No need for the card.  No rewards.  No chance of graduating.  The bank doesn't even offer credit cards anymore as far as I'm aware (no website either, haha).  No annual fee or monthly fees, but they also have no grace period (6.99% APR but no grace period so I pay a tiny bit of interest, probably was $0.32 or something in the past 7-8 months?).

Will eventually kill it, yes, but with that wide of an age range I figure it doesn't hurt me at all to keep it live for now.  Once my scores hit 800 it'll be retired for sure.  2, 3 years?