I work for Capital One and their target customer is actually people without credit scores. As far as I know, it's the only company that actually targets these customers as the primary revenue stream and also makes money.

The way it works, is they usually only give someone a $500 limit, then double the limit every 6 months If you pay monthly.

Once you get a job you can get a bump to $2000 limit with the 1.5% back easy. You just need to get a job for that.

I'm 1.5 years out of college and have access to ~100k in credit cards with a score of 750. I started with a score of 540 1.5 years ago. It's really not hard at all.

I made it into my 30s without ever having a credit card; the only thing in my credit history was a car loan (which paid off in the minimum time). Then various things caused me to be traveling a lot, and I ended up looking at airline and hotel cards, since I might as well earn miles/points for money I was going to be spending anyway.

My credit report (free from my bank) tells me my score is slightly lower than it would ordinarily be because of how short the card history is. I still get a couple "pre-approved" card offers every week and the occasional offer to raise a limit, but I just shred them.

Why in the world would you want 100k of credit?

Even if you're very flush it's handy to have the ability to use a credit card for a transaction because your checkbook is at home. Maybe you want to buy something and then sell some stock when you get home to pay for it? Credit is handy when you don't need it. I would imagine :)

Speaking only for myself, my total credit limits are huge because my wife likes signing up for new cards to take advantage of special offers and rewards programs. We don't use anything like that much credit, but it's available to us.

Increases credit score, plus I wanted the sign up bonuses. That's only on 5 cards too, btw...

It increases your score because you have a lower credit utilization and you have more available to you (supposedly signaling how responsible you are).

I have about $150k limit on my cards combined. It would be a lot higher but I asked most of them to lower my limits.

I just have a lot of cards. If they want to give me bonuses for signing up I will take them. Free money.

Don't you have to pay annual fees?

Sure but you don't have any obligation to keep the cards and pay fees year after year. When the annual fee is coming up on a card I call up and cancel it. Most cards give you the first year free anyways. Plus the no annual fee cards add up if you've been "collecting" them for a while and there's not usually a reason to cancel no annual fee cards.

Total it would be like $300, but all of them are "first year free".

Plus usually you can call and get the second year free too.

Regardless, I can cancel w.e. and the increase in my credit score is worth it. At the moment if I want to buy a house (for example) I get the best rates on loans

Many cards are first year free but quite a few aren't. AMEX stopped first year free on a lot of their cards. Regardless if I'm getting a bonus I'm subtracting any fees from that bonus to see if it makes sense. If a card is $100 annual fee and the worth of the first year is $500 it's a no brainier to get $400.

I'm a recent college graduate. It's, frankly, ridiculously easy to build up an excellent credit score. Just open up a credit card (any card, even a secured one) and consistently pay it off every month.

At this point, I have enough credit from credit cards alone to buy a small house.

Not really, I got my first card just a couple years ago in college, and the process couldn't be easier, I just applied online with my bank.

No, pretty recent. After the regulation change.

Graduated this year, Citi literally handed me a $5000 limit with minimal history (I had a credit card I used ~100 times across 4 years of college) and basically told me to go nuts.

I don't think you understand credit scores if you think that's minimal. Having even one card is an enormous boost. And four years of history is not bad either. I graduated college with no credit history and couldn't get a non-secured credit card at all, despite proof of a six figure salary.

That's not minimal credit history, that's quite a bit of credit history.

It doesn't matter how many times you swipe your card, you can get a card and never use it and and still counts for your credit history. The point being you have credit available to you but you aren't using it. You have four years of not running up your credit card, that's huge.

Is it? I was under the assumption that credit history was based on actual payment amounts and the amount paid back, instead of just paying it back. From that I assumed the ~100 or so $4 purchases each I made wouldn't matter much.

EDIT: Huh, apparently I've been ill-informed about credit history [1]. Guess I've been a dumbo and one of today's lucky 10,000.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/188xmi/is_...

You assumed very, very wrong.

FICO is based on your credit utilization (amount owed vs credit limit), history of repayment, mix of types of accounts (this has a minimal impact), number of new accounts, number of credit inquiries (aka hard pulls, this is also minimal), and length of credit history.

You had credit available to you for four years and you manage it very, very well.

Other scoring algorithms besides FICO may weigh different things differently but FICO is currently used in most lending decisions so it's what matters for now.

Yep, totally assumed higher loans -> higher repayment -> better ability to repay -> better credit. Definitely not as simplistic as I thought, thank you (and thedufer!) for making me realize this. Yay for accidental good debt management!

Think about it, someone who owes $50,000 and is making minimum payments every month is a lot more likely to default on a loan than someone who borrows a few hundred a month once in a while.

If you want to see your real Experian FICO 8 credit score for free you can do so at freecreditreport.com which is a site now owned by Experian. They break down each part of your credit score and grade you on each. (A-F)