PenFen Approved Membership with Security Freeze

[Medic981]

I received this letter in the mail today...

Dear Member: 

Thank you for establishing membership with PenFed.

Due to information obtained from a consumer reporting agency, the following restrictions will apply. 

• All check deposits made to your regular share account and personal checks presented for cash will be subject to a 5-business day hold (You may request a waiver of this hold provision after 6 months from the date of opening.)
• You may open a Share Certificate or an Individual Retirement Account, however, any deposits made into those accounts will be subject to 5-business day hold.
• ACH transfer services are not permitted. Only direct deposit service will be available.

After carefully reviewing your application, we regret to inform you we cannot open an unrestricted account at this time for the following reason: 

No Credit File/Activity

Our credit decision was based in whole or in part on information obtained in a report from the consumer reporting agency listed below.

EQUIFAX

P. O. Box 730241

ATLANTA, GA 30374

PH: 1-800-685-1111

I forgot to unfreeze my credit bureaus before applying to PenFed and Navy Federal. Navy Federal membership is still pending.

I set up direct deposit to PenFed to my share savings. I had not planned on applying for any credit products until January 2020 anyway so this is not a huge inconvenience. 

[DaveInAZ]

Hmm, I'm surprised Penfed approved your membership without being able to pull your EQ as they don't use Chex. Well, you saved a HP and even with a HP new accounts are pretty restricted for the first 6 months - daily limit of $50 push/pull ACH (but no limit on incoming ACH deposits to them), and if you had a Penfed credit card payments aren't released against the credit limit for 10 days, even if the payment is from a Penfed account.

But I doubt if Navy Fed will approve you without a HP, you might want to unfreeze EQ and then give them a call explaining that and tell them EQ is now unfrozen.

[Revelate]

Late reply but Penfed did the same to me back in 2012 though I didn't get the note about it.

To be fair I didn't really do anything with Penfed till 2014, and when I asked they removed it with a quickness, but it was a little awkward to be sure.

I don't know what the timing is in terms of how much credit history you have to show, it's probably a year but clearly 2 years (and I was deep subprime when I joined) was enough in my case and I wasn't pretty by anyone's opinion at that point.