this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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It is stupid, but you can just get a credit card and always pay it off so you don't get charged interest
Yeah this is the answer. Because of the 1 - 3% cash back, sometimes even more for gas, you're also leaving money in the table if you aren't using a credit card.
Not always or maybe not a high enough limit depending on what you want to buy. I had the same problem as OP about 6 years ago, I tried to borrow $3000 from my Credit Union to take a class and advance my career. They wouldn’t give me the loan so the options I was presented with were: a secured loan where I paid the full amount I wanted to borrow up front as collateral and then when I paid off the loan I got the collateral back (I didn’t have $3,000, hence the loan); or, I could sign up for a credit card with a $1000 limit.
To clarify, I just meant for establishing credit, not instead of a loan
Gotcha. Yeah, credit card helped me and then I was fortunate enough that a family member was able to loan me money for the class, I used that money to do the secured loan and further build my credit. I paid said family member back when I got the collateral back from my credit union.
Last I checked, you don’t even need to use the credit cards, you just need to have them. IIRC, they only ding you for late payments and for having high balances.
They need to be "active", and "paid as agreed", which doesn't mean a whole lot. You are perfectly fine to get a pack of gum each month, and pay the balance in full. Or put a monthly bill on your CC, or just use it for gas. Just so there's activity each month.
Obviously avoid any that have a fee, and pay it in full each month.
It depends on the card. Most will drop you if you don't use it at all for a year or two.
True. It’s easy to set up one recurring payment, for media streaming or whatever, and otherwise leave it be.
I did this when I turned 18 and it's been super useful (one of the few areas that my mom was a role model for me was that she had excellent credit, despite being poor as shit).
This just underscores OP's general point for me though. Beyond the car dealership stuff, I have heard of plenty of examples in which having no credit history was worse than having bad history. It's one of those things that I think does make sense, in the wider picture, but is also pretty fucked up.