How to Apply for a Credit Card with Bad Credit
This video offers advice for people seeking to repair bad credit. The three recommended methods include asking a reliable friend or relative to add you as an authorized user on their own account, thus linking your credit to theirs; getting a responsible co-signer for your own credit card account, or applying for a secured credit card.
Transcript
Narrator: How to apply for a credit card with bad credit—other than saying don’t, I still have to give some advice as to how you may be able to achieve that. Probably the quickest way to being able to re-establish credit, which I believe this is what it’s talking about, would be if you have a friend, relative, someone that trusts you, that you trust as well—you may ask them to add you as an authorized user to their credit cards. This way, whatever transactions or anything that they do will show up on your credit report. Then again, you have to trust them that they will make their monthly payments on time without being late as well.
Now, the other option that you may have is to get co-borrower. You fill out a personal credit application like this, or even if it’s a business one, you may need to have a co-borrower with you to apply for that credit card and send that in. Obviously the co-borrower has to have pretty good credit, decent credit and not too much of it so that you would be able to qualify together and hence you re-establish credit that way.
The third and final way, if the other two avenues do not work out, would be to approach a bank and ask them if you can apply for a secured credit card account. Now what the secured credit card account requires is for you to put some amount of money down. It could be $100, $200, $500 or whichever one you can afford to put down, which is going to secure that credit card that is being issued to you. Now with that credit card, you would use it exactly just like any other credit card that has been issued to you. The only difference is, if you do not pay and you default, then your cash is pretty much gone. That would be the third and final way for you to go ahead and do that, and obviously with a secured credit card, make the payments on time, do everything on time, and over time the credit card company would then make it unsecured and refund your money back to you.
