Finally received Cap1 and Disco-It secured cards

[Anonymous]

Looking back at my history around September last year, it looks like I'd applied for a Cap1 secured card and was denied. After about 3 months, I tried again and was approved. The day I paid in my security deposit, I was also approved for a Discover It secured card, so I accepted and paid for both.

After much impatience, they both arrived yesterday! So shiny, so chrome!

I'll be moving as many monthly bills to Cap1 as I can and setting it to pay off the balance each month. I'm already paying these bills anyway, so it's not any extra burden, and will save me the headache of juggling 6 different payment dates each month. I put a $375 deposit on it, which is a bit over twice what I actually need, so plenty of wiggle room if a payment varies a little month to month.

My Discover It is for gas and groceries, and the occasional extra thing here and there, like car related purposes (oil change, stuff like that). I'm going to be trying out Walmart's grocery pick-up and using Discover for that so I get the 2% cash back (I know I need to go through the specific Walmart grocery website to get the extra, just shopping there normally doesn't count). I'm also hoping that this way will help me budget food better and not make so many impulse purchases like I'm prone to if just browsing the grocery store. Doing so will actually help me save a lot more money--which means putting it into savings or putting it toward my car loan.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited to be on this new path to improving my credit and making a better life for myself.

I don't remember exactly how down in the pit my credit rating was back in August/September, but I'm looking forward to the slow inching forward that will be starting now.

I'm between 600 and 620, going by the estimates on Credit Karma etc. Even being that low, it's still possible to get a foot in the door to improvement, so don't give up!

[FireMedic1]

Congrats. Your Discover card will give you your TU FICO score. And you can sign up and get your free EX FICO from Discover Scorecard. That covers 2 FICO's. Dont go by CK's scores or Creditwise from Cap1. They are Vantage and dont mean nada. But CK is good for seeing everything reports correctly and no funny business is happening on your TU/EQ reports. Good Luck!

[Anonymous]

Congrats and good luck with the continuation of your rebuild.

One quick note regarding autopay - I’ve read a decent number of posts on here from people who used autopay as a “set it and forget it” method to cover payments, who had it backfire. It will vary bank to bank but more than a handful of people have found out that setting up autopay doesn’t always work immediately, and they missed their first month’s payment because for whatever reason, it didn’t send payment until the second month. Be sure you’re on top of it and that the payment actually goes through in a timely enough fashion that if you must, you can manually make a payment within the time constraints set forth by each card issuer so that they will post before the due date cutoff.

Once autopay is up and running for 2-3 months of payments, don’t back down. I am convinced that being active in managing your credit accounts is the best way to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Set up a spreadsheet to track balance/utilization percentage/payment due/date due and the like and check it and your accounts often. Mine is set up for all of that, plus overall utilization, amounts needed to pay off to cross the scoring thresholds, and quite a few other things as well like tracking dates of most recent CLI, open dates, and the like. The cells have formulas so when I pay something or make a charge and enter the new card balance, all of those UTI percentages and payoff amounts update accordingly. I always have a snapshot of where I stand and what moves I can make to improve my standing. I check every account daily, verify balances and charges and payments, doublecheck that payments due are made and posted, etc. I have 10 cards and this takes about 20 minutes each morning. It is likely overkill and not necessary to do each day but I do it anyway. Nothing has ever snuck by or lapsed either so to me it’s time well spent.

The main takeaway, regardless how far you choose to take these things, is that actively managing your accounts is always better than going on autopilot and just letting things happen. They will happen, until there’s a glitch and they don’t. That’s not worth a 50-100 point hit to my scores in my mind.

[Anonymous]

I have alerts set up for due dates, and always check that they're scheduled properly.

I finally set up my bills using the new card, and worked out what the monthly payment will be so I've got it set aside properly.

I'm trying out Mint right now to view all of my accounts and all of my bills in a single place. I'm liking it so far. It's nice signing in and seeing at a glance where my accounts are sitting, my upcoming bills, monthly spending versus income and so on.

I'm also making use of my Simple account where I can allocate cash into monthly goals for various bills and see instantly how much I have for each and when they're ready to be paid.

I'm feeling much more confident in myself keeping everything going smoothly and reducing overspending in areas where I struggle (junk food is one of my biggest downfalls). But I'm working on reprogramming my brain to think "putting jumkfood on the credit card is dumb, don't do that" while also refraining from using a debit card.

It takes time to make new habits, and I feel like a combination of Mint and Simple is really going to help me here.

I was going to try Ally bank, but I have had nothing but trouble with it so far. The website seems to be nearly always having issues, either not loading at all, errors while trying to log in, errors preventing my accounts from showing up, unresponsiveness, even the mobile app will stop working. That is way too unreliable and risky for me, so I decided to just let that account go. I've had Simple for a while, never had issues with them, and they've introduced useful features since I last used the account.

This new journey into credit is going to be an exciting one, I think.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like you’ve found a system that’ll work well for you. Now you can put it to work, garden your cards, and watch your scores start to grow

[simplegirl]

Congratulations you can do it

[Remedios]

Congrats on your success so far . Scores will grow in time, dont sweat it too much. 

[Anonymous]

You're off to a great start OP! I put close to $20k in spend through secured Cap1 and Disco cards over 18 months, paying frequently. My scores rose steadily until I qualified for unsecured credit. You can do it.