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According to Mom, secured credit cards are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Mom would know. She grew up during the Great Depression and saw banks close, people lose their life savings and other financial horrors. Later she saw her son, me, mess up his credit early in life and go for years without any credit whatsoever. Resigned to only paying cash was very limiting at the least. Then a friend at work told me about secure credit cards. He told how he too had wrecked his credit, signed up online at a website and sent a couple of hundred bucks to a secured credit card provider and now had a credit card of his own. His credit card looked just like every other credit card and didn't even have anything on it denoting that it was a "secured credit card". My friend told how he'd found his secured credit card provider through a search engine query, I believe it was Google, and didn't have to approach a local bank or lending institution. Well, then I was sold on secured credit cards.I went online and did a search for secured credit cards. I was able to find plenty of credit card providers, but not any who provided secured credit cards. I finally found a provider, filled out the form and wrote a check to mail off for my deposit. Within a week or so I received my credit card. I remember just holding it and staring at it. My own credit card, at last. Fixing my damaged credit was made easier with my secured credit card. My Mom told me that a lot of the bills I paid every month could be paid with my secured credit card or even paid with it on an "auto-pay" system and best of all, NEVER be paid late.(She was always after me to make my payments on time. ) Soon I paid everything from my elctric bill to my cable bill with my new credit card. It really made it easier on me because now I just wrote one check instead of several to pay most of my bills. Mom reminded me to make sure that I made my credit card payment early or ontime. Several months went by with me paying my consolidated bills through my secured credit card. Then a home came on the market that I really wanted to own. I figured I could make the payments OK, but how could I qualify for the home loan? My secured credit card came through for me. |