$50 Bonus after 1st Purchase in 3 months on a Discover Card here:
Everybody this is beat the bush today we’re gonna talk about what you should do as a college student getting your first credit card and what you can do to maximize your credit score as you use it once you turn 18 you can get a credit card in your own name and if you go to college you’re gonna have all these booths laying around trying to get you to sign up for a
Credit card offering you a stuffed animal water bottle or like a sweatshirt in the school’s logo or whatnot as a sign up bonus for getting the credit card the value of these things is not really that much but it’s pretty good for a college student you get something for free and you all you have to do is just sign on the dotted line before you even get a credit card
It’s good to know what kind of spender you really are are you the type where you if you have $100 in your pocket you tend to spend it all within a day or two or are you a saver where if even if you have the cash sitting in your pocket won’t be very tempted to spend it all and you end up saving most of it third thing is really knowing what kind of repayment habits
You have you owe anybody any money do you usually pay it back very punctually the reason i bring this up is because you really got to know how much willpower you have in order to limit your spending where if you get a credit card with a high limit are you going to spend it all or are you just gonna spend what you have and are you going to repay it back very properly
As a college student you’re probably getting your first credit card and most likely you can only qualify for a discover card visa mastercard it requires a little bit more history if you get a discover card you’ll most likely get it with only about a couple hundred dollar limit because of my high credit score in my other video i got a lot of questions asking about
How you should use your credit card in order to meet your credit score goal as up as fast as possible getting your first credit card there’s a few things that you have no control over the number one thing that affects your credit score is the history you have no history so you’re just trying to build a history right now and it takes many many years before you can
Get a really high credit score all you can do is be a very good citizen and use your credit card and pay everything back every single month never ever be late how do you not be late is you use the auto payment option in your credit card and make sure it all pays off never spend over what you have because then you can’t pay it back when you apply for the credit card
There’s in part where you put in income and that’s where you put in all the money that you get even from student loan or whatever that you would use to buy everyday things such as books meals etc you can actually include that in order to get a higher limit the third thing is when you’re actually using the card do you actually pay it back every single month and on
Time every single time if you even miss one out of let’s say one year it’s going to affect you quite a bit so make sure you pay it back and on time not on the day don’t wait till the same day to pay it off if you’re late one or two days that counts as a miss if you do miss it which i have when i was going to college and using a discover card you can actually call
In and ask for them to not at least charge you the thirty five fifty dollar of a late payment fee however that event of being late may still get reported to your credit bureau which will reduce your credit score at least you don’t have to pay thirty five fifty dollars you’re allowed to be late once but not more than not if it’s the second time they won’t cancel it
Out for you so discover it as a student using discover is pretty good it has those rotating categories where it gives you five person cash backs just got to make sure which category it is you can make a little note and put it in your wallet to let you know which category has five percent cash back you just make sure that when you’re buying something use that clark
For that category so you get the cash back if you only have five hundred dollar limit as a student that’s okay you probably don’t spend more than five hundred dollars a month on stuff tuition usually can’t pay with a credit card so you end up only buying books or maybe occasional eating out week your $500 limit my recommendation is to actually use it very close to
The limit if you’re very good with how much you spend you can go all the way up to 99 percent even and then make sure you don’t go over because if you go over to credit card but he doesn’t like that what we would see if you get very close to the limit month after month and you pay every single month they would start to notice and they would be like wow you know
This guy really needs more credit so eventually there will increase your limit but don’t just wait for them to increase it for you after maybe three months of doing this call them up and ask hey can i get a limit increase you may or may not get it depending on how many months threshold they would like to see but once you increase that you’re on the way to
Increasing your credit score because one of the factors of a high credit score is your total credit limit so if you increase this you increase your total credit score one of the best cards you can get right now let’s discover it and this rotating category thing is just really annoying before when i was going to college they had a discover open-road card where you
Get 5% cash back on gas but you still have a sallie mae credit card which awards you 5% cash back on gas and groceries up to $250 a month and 5% on books up to $750 a month that’s perfect for a student i actually still use that card for gas groceries not so much long books it’s good to know what was on offer before but right now one of the best cards you can get is
The discovery card the next thing would be the american express card which has 6% groceries but has a $75 yearly fee as a college student you won’t be able to qualify for american express i remember i can only qualify for american express after getting a visa and master clark for quite some time and then i can get an american express so the first cart you get will
Most likely be a discover card and after you have this for a while you can probably get a visa or a mastercard so in short if you’re a responsible spender go ahead and collect all those prizes sign up for those credit cards get the water bottle or whatever and get free stuff it’s great when you do get the credit card spend it up to maybe 90% of the limit and pay it
Back every month on the flip side getting your first credit card with the $500 limit to spend on anything you want is tempting if you’re the type that it gets tempted easily it might not be such a good idea to get the credit card some people actually swear by using cash or debit card only because they get tempted so easily in those cases it might be good because
If you get a credit card you might just push yourself into debt permanently if you have no self-control you get the card you spend spend spend right and then you only make the manman minimum payment and then you spend some more and then you’re in a rathole where you keep on perpetually paying for the credit card interest and never paying it off you end up spending
$500 today but you may end up paying back like $3,000 over the life of the credit card aside from being an irresponsible spender some really really short recommendations i have as college student in general is that when you do buy books don’t buy it’s a cheap knockoff one that has really thin paper because i bought one of those one time and you end up not being
Able to read it very well and you just kind of hate the book so then it’s harder to absorb the material when you’re reading through the page and you can see the words on the other side just it’s not worth the the $50 or whatever savings just get the regular book you can save quite a bit of money by selling your books back to the book store i recommend to actually
Sell back all your work books right after the quarter or semester because you most likely won’t use the work books i don’t use the work books after the class however the core textbooks don’t sell those back because those are useful depending on your major you may need to refer back to them so i recommend keeping all of the core textbooks core meaning that all the
Classes in your major if it’s non core and you don’t really care about the subject yeah so sell those one thing i want to say is about study abroad is if you get offered that go because you’re never going to get about three to six months of living in another country and studying it’s gonna be like the best time of your life really once you finish college and then
You go to work you’re only gonna get maybe to four weeks vacation and in paris and you can’t really use that to live in another country for that long a durations even if you get nothing done at all okay it’s really worth it so go do that leave a comment down below ask me about it so that’s all i have for you today i hope this helps you get a good base on how to
Use your first credit card don’t forget to leave a comment down below if you have a question give me a like and subscribe somewhere over here thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
Maximize Credit Score while in College | BeatTheBush By BeatTheBush
