Can you send me a DM or a profile page post with a quick rundown about this? I’ve never had a credit card (never needed one) but now that my cars are paid off I have been curious about getting one so I could rack up airline miles or cashback or something in addition to padding my FICO score.
Sure, I'll just post it here. FICO scores are a
very simple calculation, and there's a bit of room to hack it. Assuming you always pay the full balance on time (duh), the next most important factors are credit utilization and average credit age. There are a couple strategies to reduce utilization: you can either get new credit cards, reducing your average age; or request credit limit increases, limiting your utilization gains. I used to do this thing where I bought a gold coin on a new card every year, paid it off immediately, and took the welcome reward as cash. But after I paid off my student loans, they closed the accounts so the average age became the limiting factor. Now I just tell credit companies I make $250k yearly and pay $1k rent, and continuously request limit increases across three cards with a total limit of $50k or so. They don't really check your income but don't give them some outlandish number.
A quick way to boost your credit score is to ask a relative to add you as an "authorized user" on their oldest credit card, and tell them to use it as if it was their own card during routine purchases like groceries, etc. There's no need to possess the card yourself because it piggybacks off their credit history, increasing your average age. If you can't use the card yourself, they don't need to trust you not to ruin their own credit, so it should be fine even if they refuse to cosign anything. There are some other techniques like taking out personal loans to increase your credit mix, but honestly I have the credit score of a boomer with half a dozen cards so it's not an issue for me. Also, don't worry about hard pulls, they lower your score by a couple points at most and drop off in two years. You can apply for the same type of credit, e.g., a mortgage, within 45 days and it counts as a single hard pull.
As far as credit security goes, it's best to permanently freeze your report with all the agencies (don't forget ChexSystems for checking accounts) and simply lift the freeze whenever you need to apply for new credit. Those monitoring services are a meme and don't actually prevent anyone from committing credit fraud in your name, while a security freeze will block all credit applications unless you personally whitelist it. Also, check out
OptOutPrescreen.com (wiki link because the site is legit but looks like an ID theft scam) where you can mail in a form and permanently remove yourself from (((pre-approved))) offers, which are a massive ID theft threat vector.
tl;dr the big nose people will basically suck your dick to have you fall behind on that sweet 25% APR, and will literally give you hundreds of dollars on the chance that they can commit usury against you, so use it to your advantage.
