what's good comrades. tl;dr i didn't learn to drive until i was 27. i'm 31 now. in those 4 years, i've had two cars i bought cheap outright with cash, so i have never financed a more expensive car. these were 800 bucks each.
i only got a credit card at the beginning of 2024, i was terrified of debt my whole life so i never even wanted to get one. but i figure, i need credit to exist in amerikkka so the time has come. my score is 650 on one site and 697 on another. so let's assume it's like 670 actually.
i've applied for two auto loans but was turned down due to 'limited credit' but i see teenagers who work at wendy's driving nicer/newer cars they were able to finance, and i'm not even trying to get anything like that. i'm only looking to get a loan of like 4-6k, to buy cheap reliable used car from like 2005-2013. i see lots of options. i'm trying to avoid the dealer financing tho due to the dude telling me they typically charge like 25% interest through dealership financing.
how exactly does this work? is my only choice to get ripped off with dealer financing? i can't join a credit union, i've tried- limited credit. i don't get at all how credit works. i don't even want this shit. but currently i drive a 1995 toyota avalon that's falling apart and it's not safe to drive so i gotta figure something out
There’s some more nuance here that took me a while to understand.
Example: if you have a total of $600 in balance, but this statement period you’re required to pay $200 in full, you pay off just $200 and you have paid off everything that you owe, and creditors will see you used $400 (only what’s left of your balance is reported as used)
Next month, assuming you buy $10, you will owe $400, and after you pay $400 the creditors will see that you’ve used $10 in credit.
The statement’s balance is the TRUE “minimum” amount owed. Paying this without paying your entire balance will keep you in the green because that’s the amount the creditors demand fully from you.
Ironically, also don't utilize TOO much of the line of credit, either, because that can hurt your credit score.
death to banks death to america
This is one thing I think a lot of people misunderstand. I mean maybe I misunderstand too but based on capitalone credit wise's rubrik it seems like you really want to have the lowest statement balance possible while still making some purchases on occasion. (Ie the goal being to have a credit history where the credit usage is very low, or the mantra of "use your credit to build credit" probably should be "use it regularly not heavily").
I just stuck my 5 or so credit cards in a box and take them out every couple of months to buy a bag of chips, then double check the auto pay. My credit is like 816 from doing this for like 10 years.
It also seemed to help that my parents added me as an authorized user on one of their high limit cards when I was like a teen - I'm not sure how that can affect my credit but on credit reports it seemed to include their massive 30K credit limit into the calculation which appeared to help a ton, and I rarely or never used that card. By now that account is closed but I've managed to get increases on most of my cards so that my own credit limit is high enough to replace it.
Honestly, that helped you way more than your box and chips method.
Well, they help with different things. Having my name as authorized on that card added a large credit line but didn't contribute to a credit payment history (I still had a "thin file" for quite a while and still had to co-sign my first apartment) nor does it help with a low credit utilization. In fact it hurt that aspect some because my parents would occasionally have a large balance and I would see my credit dip temporarily.
Regardless it's important to work on all the contributing factors of the credit score and available credit is just one of them.
More credit = lower overall utilization. Using $50 out of $100 total credit is 50% utilization which is very bad. Using $50 out of $1000 is 5%. There are other factors, but not all of them are important. For example, on time payments is probably the most important.
I mean yeah that's true - I'm not disputing the importance of having high available credit, but if it was such a shortcut as suggested then it wouldn't have taken me years on top of that credit line to not have a thin file and a decade of buying monthly chips on multiple cards to get the score I have now. So I don't think it's exactly the cheat code that anarchoilluminati suggests it is.
What I'm getting at is that this credit line definitely helped a ton, but it didn't get me there on its own. It gave me a perfect score in credit availability but it took years for the rest of my credit score factors to fill in from my own small purchases on my own cards.
This also supports what I'm saying - that getting added as an authorized user on a high limit card helped in the available credit and utilization metrics, but that you still need to do other things to round out the score, which I don't think can just be brushed away by claiming that getting added to an existing card did most of the work.
Edit: also the problem with getting added to someone else's card for utilization is that their utilization shows up as yours too - so if my parents carry a balance of 15k on their 30k card then my utilization would have been better off if I only had $100 of credit and only used $5. While my available credit went down when that card closed my utilization actually improved because I don't carry balances so in my case being in their card only helped my total credit. Luckily by the time they closed that card my own credit line about matched what that card had so I didn't take a hit on available credit.
Correct, pay the statement balance, just set it to auto pay every month from your bank account (imo).
You will not be charged a cent of interest by doing this, there's no catch. You do not need to pay interest to increase your credit score.