Credit card research 2021

In October 2021, I did some research on getting a credit card for the first time.

Reasons I hadn't bothered getting a credit card until now

• Mostly, I was too lazy to do the research and didn't have an urgent need
• I don't buy a lot of things nor do I have a need to borrow money, so some of the benefits of a credit card don't matter to me

Reasons I decided to get a credit card

• I was taking care of a few other financial things, so I was already in the "mood" for doing some credit card research
• I recently learned that credit cards seem to have better protection against false purchases made using the card
• Some travel plans I have meant I was expecting to make more purchases, and might benefit from some more of the benefits of a credit card
• Building a credit score might be useful in the future (though at the moment I don't have any concrete plans to borrow any money)

Choice of credit card

Factors that were important to me

• No foreign transaction fees
• No deposit required (i.e. not a secured card)
• No annual fee (don't want to be incentivized to make purchases)
• Card reliably works abroad (e.g. I found some mentions that Discover It cards don't work well outside the US)

Factors that weren't important to me

• Cash back or other financial benefits one can earn through purchases

Credit scores

Unlike many products, one cannot just order any credit card and receive one. Instead, one must apply for a credit card (or go through some automated pre-approval process) in order to qualify for it. The main (sole?) determinant of whether one qualifies for a card seems to be one's credit score.

One of my confusions was that credit card recommendation sites (example) list credit score ranges that are good for each card (i.e. where you have a good chance of being accepted), but that I didn't even know my credit score or if I even had one. And the only way to find out for sure my credit score seems to be to get a credit card. From reading a bunch of threads on r/personalfinance it seemed like I should get an "easy" credit card for now, and then later switch to a better card once my credit score was higher.

There are also pre-approval tools like these two which can give you some indication of your credit score.

And then there are tools like creditwise and credit karma that seem to give some estimate.

I'm honestly not really sure how credit scores work and didn't try to investigate this deeply.

Choosing a card

this tool was also somewhat helpful https://wallethub.com/credit-cards/no-credit-no-annual-fee-no-foreign-transaction-fee/

the only problem is that they don't have a filter for secured vs not secured, so you have to mentally filter it out at the end

but you can see how capital one platinum was identified there

the only other non-secured ones on there are petal and deserve, neither of which i have heard much about on reddit/other sites

Final choice

Eventually, I found these two pre-approval tools through this comment. These tools seemed to confirm that I indeed had no credit score. So I went for the only card that seemed to meet all my requirements, which was the Capital One Platinum card.

discover it only offered a secured credit card (i.e. one where you have to deposit some amount of money as collateral), but capital one offered their boring card with no benefits (capital one platinum) so i decided to go with that

the card still has no foreign transaction fees, and discover it seems to have problems being accepted in some places (especially abroad) so this seems like an ok outcome to me

i was automatically approved for capital one platinum, and the card was mailed to me after several days

capital one's creditwise tool says "looks like you're still building credit" instead of giving me a score, so that seems to confirm that i have no score yet

General credit cards info

Utilization

I'm still confused about this/have seen contradictory info. These threads seem to imply that utilization doesn't matter unless one is going to have one's credit score checked very soon, and that utilization has no history, so one can just use the card very little shortly before applying for a new credit card or just make sure the balance is 0 before applying or something? Other sources recommend only using 10-30% or the available credit.