Submitted by [deleted] t3_127n8sb in personalfinance
[deleted]
Submitted by [deleted] t3_127n8sb in personalfinance
[deleted]
Request higher limits on your exisiting cards. Except maybe the Firestone card. This is better for your score than opening a new card in the short term.
Then, to be frank, you need to make and stick to a budget. Eliminate credit card debt and only put purchases on a card that you can pay off each month and then the APR won't matter.
[deleted]
You can't pay off and use your current cards correctly. You don't need another card and need to instead pay off the debt you already have. APR should be a completely irrelevant aspect of using credit cards. I have zero clue what mine are.
I'm not struggling to pay them off though. I could pay off the $400 if I wanted too, but I'm just making payments above the minimum. I do think I need one with a higher limit, these just have low limits because I got them during a rough time
Okay, well I could pay my $400 one off right now. I just figured I'd make payments instead. I just want to make sure that I have a higher limit, I'm not really understanding why people think I shouldn't? I really just want to get rid of these two and have a card with a higher limit, even if that means just paying off my $400 one.
> Okay, well I could pay my $400 one off right now
Then pay it off. You're paying 30% interest on it, that's insane. There's no excuse for not paying it off if you have the money for it.
> I'm not really understanding why people think I shouldn't?
Because, if you want an honest answer, your posts here show you do not know how to responsibly handle a credit card and the last thing you should do is give yourself the ability to pile up even more high interest debt.
Use the ones you have responsibly (which means never paying one single penny of interest) for awhile. Then get a new card once you know you can handle the ones you have. Because right now, you can't handle them.
> I'm just making payments above the minimum.
Why?
Trying to build my credit faster, I thought that if you made above minimum payments instead of paying it all off at once that it raised your score faster? I also break it into two payments a month. For instance my minimum of my $700 card is $40. So I pay two payments of $40 usually.
The issue really is that I have not a clue how credit works and need to do some reading, but I thought that was how it worked and my credit has been growing a lot lately
> I thought that if you made above minimum payments instead of paying it all off at once that it raised your score faster?
Nope. You need to pay off the entire statement balance before the due date.
> I also break it into two payments a month.
Nope. You don't get bonus points for making multiple payments.
Pay the statement balance before the due date. It's really that simple.
Where did this myth come from? I see it all the time lately.
Pay them all off entirely every month or don't use them.
I'm not sure but I totally fell into it I guess if it's not true, just have heard a lot of people say that. I admittedly don't know what I'm doing, all I have to go off of is that my score has been rising fast the last few months so I figured it was true. Then also credit karma I got an alert from them today saying that if I paid $126 of my $400 balance it would give me a credit boost, so I just paid that and it'll come out of my checking tomorrow.
Well okay thank you I guess, sheesh why is everyone so aggressive over this
t-poke t1_jeeulno wrote
None.
Focus on getting the cards you have paid off, when you're carrying balances with 30% interest, the last thing you need are more credit cards.
Once you've paid off every penny of credit card debt, then you can worry about more credit cards. And if you use them responsibly, the interest rate literally doesn't matter.