Credit Cards Articles

Secured credit cards are a great option for people who have bad credit and need a credit card to start rebuilding. They’re also good for those who need a first credit card to gain some positive credit history.

Check out Orchard Bank’s Secured MasterCard which has a low 7.9% interest rate and no account processing fee. If you’ve used this credit card, leave your own review.

Recommended:

• More Credit Card Reviews
• How to Choose a Secured Credit Card
• Pros and Cons of Secured Credit Cards

Building up credit history takes time, persistence and responsibility but if you fail to protect those years of hard work it can only take seconds to ruin your track record. Identity theft can cause severe damage to your financial future if you fail to protect yourself properly from your personal information getting into the wrong hands.

According to reports the most common form of identity theft happens through credit card fraud.

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Thirty percent of your credit score compares your total amount of credit to your level of debt. This is your credit utilization or credit-to-debt (CTD) ratio. Since lower ratios mean higher credit scores, a ratio of 30% or less is ideal. Why? Creditors view higher balances as a sign of financial overload.

Here’s how it works in practice. If you have 3 credit cards with each with a $1,000 limit and balances of $600, $800, and $900, your total CTD ratio will be about 77%. This is dangerously high. You should bring those balances down to $300 or less to increase your score.

Be careful. Closing your accounts doesn’t hide the credit card balance from the ratio.

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In the past few months massive changes to credit card legislation have been implemented in an effort to protect consumers from the historically unregulated practices of the credit card industry. These regulations have caused a shift in how credit is gained, earned and managed on all ends.  The bottom line is that consumers have to pay better attention to spending to avoid debt and lenders have to be reasonable, ethical and upfront about fees, charges and changes to credit card agreements.

It is unfortunate that it took legislative reform to get the credit conditions headed in the right direction.  What is equally unfortunate is the moprofits that have been made by companies offering to provide free credit reports only to charge consumers for services rendered.  This specific practice resulted in yet another law that took effect on April 2nd 2010 to protect consumers from agencies charging for free credit reports.   Credit reports and credit cards go hand in hand, or at least they should. Credit repor

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