@Anonymous wrote:Interesting response..
I wonder what the others above have to say about your reply. All I want is a 720 credit score.. Not for a mortgage either..
I can't understand why getting 3 credit cards with $200 limits and keeping the balance under $20 warrants a high credit score?..
Payment history is king and you build more history faster with 3 cards vs. 1. Inquiries are gone in a year, and I wouldn't do applications before the year is up if it were me, I don't agree with the open one account philosophy when starting: get those accounts and get both payment history and AAOA rolling.
That said not all credit files are created equally; someone with a 720 and one year on 3 credit cards likely has a worse approval chance with a lender than I do with a near 720 (FICO 8 EX) with more history even with all my old negatives from 5 years back.
@Anonymous wrote:
My friend Revelate is more experienced than I am so take his advice . IMO thinking long term one card is better for the first 6-8 months . What are you gonna do with 3 secured cards a year from now ? their gonna be worthless and useless to you .
DEpends on the card and your cash flow.
BOFA is a stellar card that you can keep basically forever. Discover if you can get it is excellent too, I'm not as familiar with that one.
The others, you keep till you no longer need them or you need the cash. Even the cards you can get at a year, realitically unless your needs are very very vanilla as far as rewards go, you'll have at least one if not two more app rounds; there's plenty of secured cards from CU's that are at $0 AF and you're building that relationship right from the start.
You want more than one card ideally to begin with so you can start the AAOA clock, really if I were doing this again I'd do 3 secured revolving, and 2 secured installment loans and then sit on my hands for a year from what I know now. It's hard to predict what'll happen in life, and as such we're all best off trying to build the best file that we can ASAP, and 5 tradelines of different types is way better than 1 at that same year.
It's similar to the app spree methodology / math I post here occasionally in terms of AAOA building and minimizing damage over time, and every single payment to every single tradeline is one more token in the bucket telling UW "I'm not a risk, really!"
Also along those lines, people don't usually find this forum until something went wrong: mortgage was no go, or couldn't get auto financed, or got a shockingly high rate or the collection notices started coming in. Whatever the reason, it's best to build credit as fast as possible and only the single tradeline is leaving a whole lot of credit history on the ground: it's not bad, it's just not optimal.
Really the only constant is that time passes, and as such it's optimal to make best use of that time possible. That's really all I'm getting at.
