Hatake said:Any other advice? I'm open to the morally grey.Yeah. Committing fraud is a crime.

lindylady said:Ok avoid fraud. Instead get one or two low limit credit cards with no annual fee. Use them . Pay off balance in full every month. you have no credit because you have no credit history. In 6 months ask for secured amount to be removed or limit to be increased. 3 months later check credit scores.they will be up much higher.
You need a credit history in order to get a good credit score and a good credit score to get a good morgage rate.

Other then secured credit, who is most likely to give me a credit card? Department store? My bank? Costco?

Hatake said:Other then secured credit, who is most likely to give me a credit card? Department store? My bank? Costco?

Department stores and your bank. If you have a history with a financial institution, it helps. I guess it depends on the bank as well. I had the Structure, Montgomery W@rd, and Robinsons May cards as my first three (I don't know what order). Wait, are these places all out of business now? Gawsh. Anyway, I qualified for these but couldn't get a First USA. I think my first bank card was from PFCU but I had a 10 year history with them, followed by an Advanta.

Yeah, you just need to build your credit.

JorgeBurrito said:Even though you are not a student, look for a student card. They are usually easy to get and good starter cards. Some require proof of attending college, most don't. Oh yeah, read the faq/sticky threads, noob.

Yeah, how much I wished I'd applied to all the student cc offers while I was in school.
Did read them, they weren't much help, thanks for the advice though.

I think that some people are being a little hard on poor Hatake. He's right, the FAQ is sparse on how to build credit for those with little to no history. Furthermore, Hatake did us the favor of asking several pointed questions, used punctuation, and broke questions into easy to read lines or paragraphs. Sure, it's not the best new thread on FWF, but not every thread can be.

One important piece of information, which I didn't see in your post, is if you have an income. If you do, and you have a relationship with a bank or credit union, try getting a card there. Secured cards, as others have mentioned, are a way to go, and it would probably be easy to set it up at your bank or credit union.

At my credit union, my overdraft protection for my checking account is a line of credit. It appears on my credit reports pretty much like a credit card does. You should have overdraft protection of some sort already, and maybe you can change it into something like this? If not, now is a good time to set it up.

Currently, FICO scores can be cheated, though the method for computing scores will change this year to close this loophole(I think this is happening, don't know!). This is the friend/parent method you mentioned. If you are added as an authorized user on a credit card, that account will appear on your credit report. I've not looked closely into this, but I believe that the account's full history gets reported on your credit report. So, if you need to get a jump start, you could ask a parent to please add you as an authorized user for a credit card. The ideal card would be for a line of credit that's ancient and has not seen a late payment (30 days late or more) in 7 years or so. I'd think that any account without late payments would help. This gives you the power to run up the card, so don't be surprised if people balk at this option.

My first line of credit was from JC Penny's, which is a department store. I was 18 or 19, and I don't recall if I had any income to list. I might have written in what little I made over the summer. I've never used the card after opening it, and it's still open and on my report. I wouldn't worry about who issues you your first card, you just need something right now to get things rolling. It won't hurt to keep an old account open.

I've read that to have the highest scores, you need several types of debt, like credit cards and a mortgage. I just have credit cards on my credit report, but my score was in the mid 700s last I looked. This was just bumbling about with less than 9 years of history, several recent hard pulls, and not trying to game the system. If you are shooting for a high score, you'll be able to pull up there quicker.

If you have a parent or sibling with good credit, have them slap you onto their oldest card(s) as an 'Authorized User'. Have them shred the card when they receive it in the mail. Wait 1 month and apply for a new card.

This should still work for another few months until the new FICO scoring is adopted by most of the card companies.

I did this for the GF. She had never had a credit card, but this way she inherited a 20+ year history card with a reasonable 10k credit line. She applied for her first credit card 6 weeks later and she got a Platinum 8k card. I think it worked well.

~miser

I could swear that someone in this post pointed me towards Creditboards.com, but I can not find the comment to quote.
Anyway, thank you all very much for your advice, especially the cb link as I learned quite a lot from the site.

For future reference of people searching through and finding this, The Authorized use bit is a great technique called "piggybacking", where trusted family or friends add you as an authorized user and it is possible that the history of this credit line will be reported on your cr. Sadly however, this loophole is coming to an end. FICO08 is a new method of calculating your fico score that the CRA's are going to be adopting. FICO08 does not count AU's, so it's going to be an interesting event for a lot of people. I'm still going to try the AU approach myself to obtain a decent line of credit before the loophole is closed. Wish me luck on the timing of that.