My Credit Journey So Far
An "about me" and why I might have something interesting to say about credit cards
Ported over from a credit series I launched on Substack back in 2021
5 years ago, I started my credit journey as a poor college student on a shoestring budget eating ramen every night to save a few bucks just so I could afford my next meal.
But you don’t care about that.
You’re curious about what a random stranger on the web could possibly offer that a dozen other sites have not already covered.
Well, 17 credit cards later*, since my experience of opening my first card with Chase and hundreds (yes, hundreds) of conversations educating my friends and family on how credit works, I want to share with you, random person on the web, how credit works and how you can leverage it to improve your own finances.
*This number now includes 30 total cards opened and 22 active credit cards.
I want to make it clear that me having multiple credit cards by itself doesn’t make me an expert by any means, just that it’s made me very familiar with the process. After all, I could easily be living paycheck to paycheck, deep in credit card debt, and paying their exorbitant interest with terrible money management skills.
Rather, I’d like to let my credit score do the talking after having raised it from the mid-600s all the way to the 800s despite juggling multiple accounts and occasional large balances, all with a fairly short credit history.
The key is understanding the rules of credit.
If we know the rules, we can properly set up boundaries to ensure we don’t do anything to get us flagged. More importantly, we can learn to game it and boost our scores. After all, lenders screw consumers all the time, why should we not use credit instead to improve our lives the way it was meant to?