Well, I only have one piece of advice, and it may be just my opinion (so take it for what it's worth), but god do I wish someone else would have given me this advice when I was starting out building credit.
My advice: run, run run run RUN away from bank of america as soon as possible. They have been an absolutely terrible bank in my experience, and the only reason I don't stop doing business with them altogether is because, like you, I got my first credit card ever with them when I was young and starting out- and now I'm afraid closing it will hurt me since 1) i've grown to have a high (by comparison to my others) credit limit on the card, and 2) it's probably the longest thing I have credit history wise.
I absolutely dispise BoA though. Terrible customer service, ( I believe) they got caught in that whole scam of purposely ordering the completion of transactions so that they result in the highest amount of fees (like overdraft fees) as opposed to the order in which they actually occurred (so if you made 10 $1 purchases and later made a 100$ purchase that overdrafted you, instead of processing chronologically they would process the $100 to overdraft you f irst, then the 1$ so that each one of those little transactions would hit you with another $35 overdraft fee. I belive they finally got some kind of action brought against them for that, so now they use some other crappy system where they still get multiple fee's out of you.... they've charged me late fees on credit card payments even when I payed on time and wouldn't reverse the charges..... they started charging me fees on a limited feature checking account a got a long time ago (the whole point of getting the account with limited features is that there WERE no fees in the first place, so I guess they fixed that!)- same with that credit card I mentioned. It's a crappy little high interest card (obviously because I had no credit to speak of when I got it), but they made up for it by the fact that there was no annual fee. Then they add an anual fee later on without making up for it with any change to the card. There's more, but this post is probably long enough already...
I can't tell you how much I hate this company. I moved pretty much all of my every day financial activities to BECU a few years ago and it was like a breath of fresh air. The amount of things you can do from the website, the great customer service, pretty much every single experience I've had with a product or service I 've gotten from BoA has been 100 times better. I have some business reasons that i'm still tied to my BoA checking account as well, but I'm going to take care of that and snip that last thread as soon as I get a chance...then it will only be the card.
Ok, that's the end of my rant. Maybe some other people have had better experiences, so take it for what you will. If I could go back a decade to when I was you though- the first thing I would do is pick a different lender to have gotten my first card with....
