A Warning About Greendot Secured Credit Cards...

[MakingProgress]

Was this a secured credit card or a Prepaid Debit Card.   As far as I know Green Dot only issues Prepaid Debit Cards and your protections are less on a Prepaid Debit card than a Credit Card. 

[credit2019]

It was a Primor secured credit card. Greendot bought them in the last year or so. See greendotcc.com. It was not a prepaid card.

[Queen_Etherea]

Just FYI, closing your account isn't going to affect your AAoA. Closed accounts still count towards your AAoA. The only way it'll affect your score is if you lose a lot of the utilization. So if that card was one of your highest credit limits, it could adversly affect your utilization and thus lowering your score. Closed accounts will still report for up to 10 years, sometimes even longer! Although, there have been stories of closed accounts coming off sooner, but those are a little more rare from what I've seen.

There are way better secured cards out there! I'm not sure what your profile looks like, but you might want to try Discover's pre-qualify page to see if you can get a secured card with them. I would also try Capital One (they have a pre-qualify page, too) and maybe a local Credit Union. My first secured card was with Wells Fargo because I've had an account with them for over 10 years, but I wouldn't really recommend going through them.

[credit2019]

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@Queen_Etherea wrote:

Just FYI, closing your account isn't going to affect your AAoA. Closed accounts still count towards your AAoA. The only way it'll affect your score is if you lose a lot of the utilization. So if that card was one of your highest credit limits, it could adversly affect your utilization and thus lowering your score. Closed accounts will still report for up to 10 years, sometimes even longer! Although, there have been stories of closed accounts coming off sooner, but those are a little more rare from what I've seen.

There are way better secured cards out there! I'm not sure what your profile looks like, but you might want to try Discover's pre-qualify page to see if you can get a secured card with them. I would also try Capital One (they have a pre-qualify page, too) and maybe a local Credit Union. My first secured card was with Wells Fargo because I've had an account with them for over 10 years, but I wouldn't really recommend going through them.

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Thanks for that! I actually completely forgot that AAoA still applies to closed accounts.  So this won't actually hurt my AAoA or my utilization, since the account was secured and when I closed it they said they were paying off the balance in full with my deposit and sending the remainder.  Interestingly, when I closed it, I told the operator why I was closing it.  She just went ahead and did it, but the next day on Experian, it showed "Account in dispute under Fair Credit Billing Act" and the balance and limit show as "unknown".  So I'm not too sure what happened there, since I definitely did not launch a new dispute on it. I was just going to give up on it and pay the charge they refused to reverse.  Perhaps she launched some sort of dispute appeal before they close out the card.  The other reports still show the old status of the account.

These days I don't actually need a secured card anyway, although it was helpful because my unsecured limits are so low ($750,  $500, and $400) and I had put $1500 with Greendot.  I was thinking of putting $5K into a different one with some place where I actually have a chance of graduating to an unsecured card of a similar limit.  If you guys have any advice on that, I'd appreciate it.