HI there, I am also looking for a secured card: my reserach so far idictaes the following 2 candiates: 1) Household bank secured card. They will review your account after 12 motnhs or so and amke it unsecured if you are not late. 2) Pacific amerircan bank. Dont know much about thi card yet. good luck.
I had both American Pacific and HH Bank aka Orchard. They are both good. A potential problem with AP is that you can get a secured card from them no matter where you live but they offer unsecured cards only to residents of WA, ID and OR. If you are not in one of these states and you are hoping to "graduate" to an unsecured card, you might want to think twice about AP if you don't live in one of these states. There may be an exception for people in one of the other 47 who later go unsecured. Best to call and ask. By the way, their website has detailed information about the qualifications for their card offers. You might want to check it out.
by the way, what were your scores when you applied for both ap and hh's secured card. HH turned me down for an unsecured card (they cited high ratio of balances to exisitng credit accounts)...
In 94 when I got the secured AP account, my score must have been very low but I don't know the number since scores were not disclosed to consumers back then. I had two positive trade lines (auto loans), a bunch of chargeoffs, collection items and liens. A clue to had bad it really was is that my auto loan from '92 had a 25% APR. After a year, AP sold my account to Orchard. Without request, Orchard dropped the APR from 18.9 to 15.9 and gave me an unsecured increase of $1500. The CL increased every three months after that until in reached $5K unsecured but they wouldn't raise the limit any higher "on this type of card" until a couple of months ago when I called retention and said I wanted more credit and a lower rate. They offered $500 more but refused to lower the rate. They wouldn't remove the $20 annual fee permanently, although they did waive it every year that I remembered to call and ask. I have two minor quibbles with them. One is that for a few years I had two accounts with them. One was a gold card with a 3.1K limit and the other the original classic from 94 with 5K. The gold had the typical benefits that come with gold cards and the classic had none. I asked to combine the accounts onto the gold so I would have those benefits and they refused to do it. The other was that I disputed $300 of unauthorized charges. After 60 days, they removed them but didn't give me provisional credit while they investigated. This meant that an account with a -0- balance was being reported as having a $300 balance. It also reduced my available credit. This may not be much of a problem on a $5K limit card but it could be a pain in the ass if the limit is $300 or $500 as most of their starting limits are To their credit, they did suspend interest charges while the dispute was pending. I decided to close the account because it didn't meet my needs. It was a good rebuilding card. I never had any serious problems with them but my situation had changed and the terms were no longer competitive. Hope you find this information useful.
Your local bank is a lot of times the best. They all offer securred cards without all the cost of the other cards. Just inquire and make sure they report them to the CRA's. I have one with Citbank, and they don't until it comes off of secured status. However, when it does, I'll instantly have two years of perfect payments.
