Student Loan

[Anonymous]

I have owe triple digit student loans. Will a secured credut card really help improve my score quickly? 

[JagerBombs89]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I have owe triple digit student loans. Will a secured credut card really help improve my score quickly? 

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35% of your score is payment history while 30% of your score is revolving utilization.  If you have any negative information, then probably not.  If you have high utilization, then the best bet is paying it down.  Without more information of your credit (any negatives? overall utilization and individual utilization? length of history? etc.), it is almost impossible to give a good answer. 

For an example, lets say you have no negatives and one credit card with a $5,000 credit limit that is 100% maxed out.  Now, if you open a secured credit card with a $15,000 limit then your overall utilization will now be 25%, which will result in your score going up.  However, your score would go up even more if you instead paid down that card to $500.  Of course, this is just one factor and it is all dependent on your entire profile.

[Anonymous]

Hello kMoore!  Welcome to the Forum.

I believe you are saying that you have student loans and do not have any credit cards at all.  Is that right?

In that case, yes it is very much in your interest in the medium and long term to have a credit card.  A secured card is fine if that is what you think you can get -- nothing wrong with that. See if you can find one with no annual fee.

Use it to buy only the things you really need and make sure you keep the utilization low on it.  For you, a simple rule would be always paying the bill in full each month (that's called PIF or pay in full) -- and make an additional payment the week before the statement cuts.  Ideally you'd like the "Amount owed" on the statement to be a positive number larger than $4 but < 9% of the credit limit.

Above all ALWAYS make all of your payments on time -- loans, credit cards, etc.  I encourage you strongly to spend time slowly learning how FICO scores work.  Clicking on the LEARN ABOUT SCORES menu at the top of the screen here at myFICO is a good place to start.

We can give you a little better guidance if you tell us more about your situation.  Do you only have student loans?  (No credit cards?)  Are the student loans in deferment or are you beginning to make payments on them?  How many loans, how much were they for originally and how much do you owe now?  And most importantly, have you ever made a late payment or missed a payment on any account?

Good luck!