No Credit Check Credit Cards

by Mack Bartlett

I’ve always wondered how any credit provider could afford to offer no credit check credit cards. It just didn’t seem possible, given what we all know about how credit is extended. You apply for a credit card, the credit company looks at your income and your credit history, and they decided a) whether to extend you credit, and b) how much to extend. How on earth could they give a person a credit card while completing ignoring the ‘credit score’ portion of the equation?

To answer that question I started doing a little digging, and I found some very interesting facts on no credit credit cards. The reason they’ll give you a $300 credit limit even though you have squat as far as a credit history is their fee structure. This should blow your mind.

I found a table called “Fees for Issuance or Availability of Credit”

Check this out:

Account Set-up Fee (what they’re going to charge the day they give you the card): $29.00

Program Fee (not sure what this means, but I’d guess it has something to do with ‘you have no credit’): $95.00

Monthly Servicing Fee (apparently this is an annual fee that they don’t want to call an annual fee, I suppose because they spread it out over the whole year): $84, paid at $7 per month

So let’s total this all up…and then laugh hysterically at how much they’re going to charge you for your $300 credit limit (okay it might be a little higher or lower, but I’m in the ballpark).

$29 + $95 + $84 = $208 for the first year, and $84 per year after that.

Funny right? Not really.

I guess you could look at this in terms of the ‘cost of establishing credit.’ That does make some sense, and if your long term goal is to buy your own home or even your own car, paying a couple hundred dollars in fees is probably worth it to get your credit rolling.

But make sure you check out alternatives. If you’re a young person you might consider asking your parents to add you to one of their credit accounts for a while. I’m not even saying they should let you use their credit card – just put you on their account so the credit agencies start to get some information about you as a credit holder. Of course, you’d only want to do this if your parents kept their credit squeaky clean. This whole thing would backfire if your parents were making late payments right? ;)

As always, I’ll finish by saying that you should use credit very conservatively and very wisely. Credit card debt is a miserable thing. You don’t need the stress, so stay clear of it.

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