This is how one of my rent to owns raised her credit score

Thought I would just pop you a mail with a little more info if you want to pop it on your site.

Most banks do these but they aren't widely advertised, the 2 we looked at were Bank of America and Washington Mutual.

Both are a minimum of $300 down which they put into a saving account, then they open you a credit line of what ever you put down, I think $10000 is the maximum. Also I do not think you have to be a resident of USA to open these accounts, IE a tourist can open an account so they have a USA card to use over here.

There is a $29 annual fee with both banks as well, the interest rate I think varies but is around 15-16%, they report back every month to all 3 bureaus, you cannot have a card report to multiple people you have to take a card and supply the required security money for each person you want to build credit with, you can have an additional signer for each account but it does nothing to help the additional signers credit (this is the part Bank Of America lied to us about so we signed with them and not WaMu otherwise we would have gone with WaMu but it had already been several weeks before we found out they had lied). We got the account opened and money taken out on the 28th May and it reported to all 3 bureaus within the first week of June as a 0 balance card and increased our score straight away. It then reported back its first balance on the 17th for us and again took about a week but all the bureaus updated (due to a refund not processing in time our first reported balance was above the 35% mark and so actually dropped our credit score back down), then it reported back the following month at which point we made sure the balance was between 30 and 35% of our available and it increased the score quite a lot. It looks like it will increase Eugene's score by about 20 points per bureau per month, not sure for how long but will keep you updated.


Our problem was we were told we didn't need this back in Feb when we had the money to put down so had to wait until May to be able to get the deposit. But Eugene's score has increased almost 100 points since the beginning of April on each credit reporting agency. I will say though if you reported balance goes over 35% it does hurt your score, also I think high balances vs credit limit hurt your score so have to watch that too. Been reading up quite a bit on best way to increase scores since we got turned down in April/May.

Hope this helps,

Sue