The Indigo Platinum card is targeted towards people with sub prime credit and it’s issued by Celtic Bank (they also issue the Surge Card). I like to cover credit cards that target people with bad credit as they are often predatory and there are usually better options out there. Let’s see if the Indigo Platinum is one of those better options or not.
Card Benefits
Let’s take a look at the benefits of the card first:
- Bankruptcy on file is OK
- You can see if you’re pre-qualified before you apply and only a soft credit check [Note: Most credit card issuers allow you to check for pre-qualified offers]
- Pick your card design for free
As you can see, the list of benefits for this card is quite small.
Fees & Other Interest Information
There are basically three versions of this card, we will look at what is the same across all cards and then the differences.
Same across all cards:
- APR of 23.9%
- Penalty APR of 29.9%
- Credit limit of $300
- Authorized user fee of $25
- Runs on the MasterCard payment network and will be accepted anywhere MasterCard is accepted
- Reports to all three credit bureaus
- No rewards program
The difference between the three cards is simply the annual fee:
- No annual fee
- $59 Annual fee
- $75 for the first year, $99 thereafter
Worst case scenario you’re going to be paying an annual fee of 33% of your total credit limit. I don’t really see how this is even legal considering that the CARD act clearly states that an annual fee cannot be greater than 25% of the credit limit.
Our Verdict
Being able to check to see if you’re pre-qualified before applying with only a soft credit pull is a neat future (although remember you can do this with other card issuers as well), unfortunately having an annual fee that is up to 33% of your credit limit is absolutely terrible. Couple that with the fact there is no rewards program and you have a truly awful card.
There are other options for people with bad credit, for example:
- The Discover it Secured card. This will help people with bad credit improve their credit score, downside is you need to put down a security deposit. Upside is no annual fees and a good rewards program and the card can graduate to an unsecured card (you get your security deposit back, but keep the card and the rewards program improves).
- There are also a bunch of other options for people with bad credit. For example using the shopping cart trick to get store credit cards.
Unfortunately this probably isn’t even the worst card on the market. Here are other cards in the hall of shame:
If anybody knows of any other cards with ridiculously high annual fees and other fees, let me know. You can help by sharing these posts on social media, hopefully unsuspecting consumers will come across these reviews before they apply and decide to go down a different route instead.
