Question:
I’ve had a U.S. Bank Secured Visa Card for more than a year now. I have perfect payment history (paid off my card in full each month) and my FICO score is now sitting around 660. How do I get my card unsecured and will I be approved? – Josh, New Mexico
Answer:
U.S bank has some pretty hard rules when it comes to unsecuring one of their secured cards. Firstly you must have the card for at least one year, customer service reps have confirmed this and U.S bank won’t even consider removing the security until the card has been active for a full year.
You need a combination of a FICO score being 680+ and a history of paying the secured card on time. The score of 680 isn’t an absolute must, there are reports of people being graduated to an unsecured card with a score of ~650, but all of these people have a perfect payment history with their secured card.
As your score is 660 and you state you’ve got an excellent credit history with the secured card, I’d go ahead and call them (use the number found on the back of your card or statement). Make sure you state that you want to unsecure your card, do NOT make a separate application as this will be a hard pull on your credit report and cause your score to drop by about 5 points. Also request that they refund the annual fee that you’ve just paid. Unsecuring your current card will only be a soft pull and won’t effect your FICO score. ColinC in the comments was hit with a hard pull on his TransUnion credit report, so it looks like this is no longer the case.
If you are approved for your unsecured card, your security deposit will be released and you will be upgraded to their U.S. Bank Visa® Platinum Card product (which thankfully has no annual fee). Your credit limit will be the same as what you had on your secured card.
If you want to apply for one of their products with flexperks, it’s recommended you wait at least six months to build some credit history with your new card before applying (this will be considered a separate application, it’s not possible to upgrade to a card with flexperks from a secured card).
On your credit report, the only thing that changes is account number and description. This’ll help you with your average age of accounts and oldest account (if this is the oldest account you have) both of which are factors in calculating the FICO score.
Hope this helps, if you’ve had experience with graduating a U.S bank credit card let us know in the comments.
[Read: Best Secured Credit Cards]
