Just wanted to drop y'all a quick line and say thank you for all the information that you guys are putting into this forum - I've been lurking for a couple years now and never posted. I figured it was finally time...
About two years ago, my wife and I were in a pretty bad spot, credit wise - low 500's kind of bad. I made a lot of bad decisions in my younger years and she never really had any credit, so we typically paid cash whenever we needed to. I had some serious dental issues that needed to be resolved, but we had no way to afford them - we had been turned down for loans, credit cards etc. I was finally able to get a CareCredit account for a few hundred dollars and a generous family member loaned us the rest, but it was a pretty humbling experience that we pretty much vowed we'd never allow ourselves to get into again...so we got to work.
A few months after that CareCredit account was opened and paid regularly, we got preapproval offers for Capitol One Platinum and took the leap. $300 limits with a ridiculous APR, but it was a pretty exciting day for us. We used it pretty heavily, always paying in full almost immediately for a couple more months before we got a couple more preapproval offers from Discover It...which we took and got what was for us huge credit lines of $2k each. Another minor celebration, another few months of regular use and payments in full and my wife received a Visa preapproval from our bank, BBVA Compass - the same bank who turned us down for a $2k loan about a year prior. She applied and was given an $11K limit - which pretty much resulted in a good Christmas for us. We made some mistakes on that one, but 0% APR for 18 months is pretty forgiving. A few months later, I rec'd an offer from AA for their rewards Visa and was given another $11K limit, which we promptly used for a tickets on dream trip to Ireland that we'd been saving for, but never realistically believing it would happen anytime soon. We both felt like we were done with cards for the time being and didnt take any more offers, but the only card we had with no foreign transaction fees were the Mastercards, which had been increased to $500 each so we were on the lookout for a higher limit card. Last night, after watching our scores climb (to us) pretty quickly over the past couple years, we got an offer for the Hilton Honors Amex. We're staying in a Hilton on our trip, my wife was already an Honors member through work travel and it had a 0% APR for 12 months, along with no foreign fees - so we jumped on it and got a $5K limit from them. We both pretty much feel like we've got all the cards we need, at least for the time being.
In the last 2 years, we've gone from low 500's to mid 700's (Discover Fico8 score) with approximately $35K in available credit - and a lot of those decisions were based on info that I got here...so thanks again.
