I guess all of us go through rough times, mine was when I was having my second baby and was on maternity leave. My husband had injured his back and could not work. We had taken out a loan a few years earlier and until that point had never had any problems with repayments. One thing led to another and now we had a bad credit history.
At the time we didn't bother to try and obtain credit elsewhere as we decided that if we wanted something we would save up and buy it. We didn't want to get ourselves further into debt.
The years passed and our finances were finally managable again. Thats when we decided it was time to get new bedroom furniture for the boys room, we had two sons now and a daughter and although their bedrooms did already have nice furniture it was old.
We found what we wanted but we were refused credit when we applied. Gutted! I couldn't understand it, we'd been straight with our money for a few years and had not used any credit at all.
One night, soon after that, we saw an advertisement on TV for credit cards and repairing credit rating and thats when we realised that by not purchasing anything on credit, we were not building our credit rating up again.
We wanted to find out more about the finance companies who were prepared to give credit to help us repair our credit rating and so searched for information on the internet. Thats how we discovered the Associates - now know as Citibank.
We decided to apply for one on-line (that way, when they refused us we wouldn't have to walk away red-faced!!)
We were directed to the site after typing in a search for repairing credit in the search engine -google. The site was informative and easy to follow. It explained that by using the card for small purchases and then keeping up the repayments, your credit rating improves. Great - so we applied.
After filling in all the info into the required fields, which was really easy, a message appeared to say that we would receive an email to confirm if we'd been successful or not. Within 5 minutes we had a reply to say we'd been accepted for a £750.00 card which we then received within a week. We had to sign for the card which came by courier and that was it. Easy.
Now the difficult bit......charges!
Nothing to pay on purchases for the first 6 months but after that, pay the balance in full and no interest is charged but if you pay the minimum you will pay anything between 13.9% and 27.9% APR variable rate on your outstanding balance.
The minimum monthly repayment is 3% or £5.00 whichever is greater.
There is no annual fee.
Make a late payment and you will be charged £25.00 although their customer service staff can remove this at their discretion if you can persuade them that there is a legitimate reason why the payment was late - for example a postal strike or bad weather (snow) as I have had to request this in the past and found the staff to be very helpful.
Having this card has definately helped to improve my credit rating as I have never had a problem since. I also have a capital one account who do much the same thing but please make sure you don't fall behind with payments or you'll be doing more damage than good. Use it within your limits though and you'll have your credit rating back up in no time.
Hope this is useful and thanks for reading.
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Advantages: free £500 overdraft, able to draw money from all ATMs without charge,free internet banking Disadvantages: no high street presence apart from London
sivam 08.04.2001 ·
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Review of Citibank
Feb 10th, 2004
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