Orchard and Applied

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone! I want to introduce myself, and share my story. After making several financial mistakes, I have finally decided to get serious about fixing my credit. I applied and got approved for a secured card from orchard for 500 and applied bank 300. I know many people hate these cards but I have to start somewhere. My EQ is 515, TU is 544, and EX is 525. My credit is shot from having many collection accounts, which I dread dealing with. All my "real" accounts have been paid on time. I have many good accounts but those collections are really messing things up for me. I have never been late on my car, or the installments I have. I have never had a credit card so I am very nervous!  

[haulingthescoreup]

Hi, samantha, welcome to the forums!

Congrats on the new card. Stay on top of it. Use it only for purchases that you would otherwise pay cash for, like gas and groceries, pay it in full, rinse and repeat. Don't let yourself get tempted into carrying balances and wind up getting in trouble. Remind yourself that this is your rebuilding card, and it's going to help to start a good long streak of squeaky clean credit. Every month that you're making ontime payments is adding more good stuff to your history.

You'll read lots of debates about whether you should pay before the statement, pay after the statement, pay part before and then after, carry a tiny balances, and so forth. These discussions are dealing with tweaking your scores and trying to coax a credit limit increase out of the bank. For the first nine months, I'd ignore all that if I were you, and just use and PIF (pay in full), use and PIF, use and PIF.

Right now, getting many months of clean payment history on your reports is far more important than CLI's and squeezing another point or two out of your scores. Good luck!