Secured credit cards are a great way to rebuild credit for those who want to avoid the higher fees and interest rates that often accompany unsecured credit cards for bad credit.  But what's the next step on the path to excellent credit after you've managed to pull your FICO scores out of the dump and into the average credit range? You really shouldn't use a secured credit card for one day longer than you absolutely must. Unfortunately, many people tend to hang onto them for way too long because they're worried about using unsecured credit again. This is a mistake and will only cost you more time and money as you work to get your credit scores back where you want them.

The time has come to ditch the old debit card and add a new rewards credit card to your wallet, but how can you be certain you'll get approved for the card you want? Is it even worth your time to fill out the application? I get these questions quite often from readers, and the answer is a simple one. There's absolutely no way to know. However, you can certainly improve your chances of getting a big thumbs up from the credit card company by making sure you know where your FICO credit scores stand before completing a card application. Once you pull your FICO scores and determine where you fall in the bad, fair, good or excellent credit range, you can then make a better decision regarding which credit card offers would be the best fit for your credit profile. Unfortunately, you're not entitled to free FICO scores each year like you are free credit reports, so you may have to settle for an estimate from a site like as CreditKarma if you're not willing to shell out cash for your scores.

If you’re anything like me, your stomach drops when you receive any form of communication from the IRS. That’s because if they’re sending you something in the mail, it's most often because you owe some clams to Uncle Sam. Inevitably, the government finds ways in which to squeeze revenues from as many angles as possible, especially with today’s trimmed public budgets and high government debt. In fact, credit card holders have often been the recipients of such attempts at increasing the public coffers.

The first thing we should clear up in this discussion is the fact that there's no such thing as a "prepaid credit card".  It simply doesn't exist.   If anyone references a prepaid credit card in a conversation with you, what they actually mean is a "prepaid debit card". The terms unfortunately get mixed up all the time, even though "debit" and "credit" mean very different things, but the fact is all of these cards are debit cards.  So now that we've got that confusing point cleared up, let's move onto how these prepaid debit cards work and how they affect your credit scores. Prepaid debit cards are actually quite simple financial products.  They basically work just like a debit card that's linked to your personal checking account, only there's no checking account to worry about.

A few weeks ago I wrote about what "fair credit" means in the credit-scoring world, so I thought it would be a good idea to follow up on that post with a brief explanation of what "bad credit" means as well. After all, there's often a very fine line these days which separates the two categories. If you have bad credit, you're probably aware of the fact that your credit isn't stellar. But just how bad is it? Is it bad, poor, fair, or just below average? Well, to answer these questions you first need to take a close look at your real FICO scores.  I'm not talking about all the so-called "free" credit scores you can get your hands on by signing up for some random credit monitoring product or paying a few extra bucks to the credit bureaus after pulling your free credit reports.  Those scores are practically worthless and should only be used if you can get the scores for free too.