Mission Lane Visa® Credit Card review: Short-term credit building at a low cost

The Capital One Platinum Secured Credit Card requires a security deposit to get started, but it also offers a unique level of flexibility: You can put down a deposit as low as $49 (other deposit amounts could be $99 or $200, depending on creditworthiness) and you may get a $200 starting credit limit. Best of all, Capital One will refund your security deposit after responsible use when you close your account or upgrade to an unsecured credit line. Since this deposit is refundable and potentially lower than the Mission Lane card’s non-refundable annual fee, the Capital One Platinum Secured is worth considering.

The SuperCash™ Card can be more accessible than a traditional secured card since your credit limit matches what you put into your secured deposit account balance. 

You can get a maximum limit of up to $5,000, which is higher than most credit-building cards. There are also significantly fewer fees, and it’s the only card available for bad credit that earns 2 percent cash back on purchases.

However, this card is similar to a debit card where you must continually fund a secured deposit account to make purchases, so the SuperCash card may be more of a hassle to manage than a typical secured card.

One of the best things about the Mission Lane Visa is that it’s an unsecured credit-building card, meaning the issuer doesn’t require a security deposit to open the card. If you don’t want to put down a large sum of money to have access to a card, the Mission Lane Visa could be worth a look.

The Mission Lane Visa doesn’t earn rewards, but that isn’t always bad. Earning rewards may distract you from your credit-building goals — especially if you expect to only qualify for a low credit limit — making a card like the Mission Lane Visa ideal.

A student or credit-building card’s cost has a large influence on its overall score.
Students already face a ton of expenses, so extra card costs are best avoided if possible, and people with limited or damaged credit tend often find the cards they can qualify for are much pricier than traditional credit cards designed for people with a good or better credit score.

We compare a card’s total cost, including any annual fees, account activation fees, monthly fees and more against the total cost of other cards in this category and assign each card a score based on its affordability. We also factor rewards-earning potential into our assessment of a credit-building card’s total cost, subtracting a card’s expected earnings from the sum of its fees.
To get a sense of a card’s rewards-earning potential, we estimate its average annual rewards rate and average annual earnings based on the most popular spending categories (as covered in the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer spending report).

However, we use a slightly lower spending assumption ($300 per month or $3,600 per year) to estimate average earnings, assuming students and credit-builders will start out with a lower credit limit, will want to keep credit utilization low and will focus primarily on small purchases they can easily pay off.
Given the many costs students face — from textbooks to laptops — the presence of an introductory APR on purchases or balance transfers also plays a role in a student card’s score.
A card’s APR is also a major factor in its credit-building score. Each card’s average APR is compared against the average APR of other cards in the category, and the cards with lower-than-average APRs receive a higher rating.
Though high APRs are hard to avoid when you’re just starting out or working on your score, credit-builders should strive for as low an APR as possible since they’re likely to either be new to managing cards or trying to establish better financial habits and avoid falling into debt.

Along with a credit-building card’s cost, our rating system takes into account how easy the card makes it to build credit. To assess this, we evaluate its credit limit potential and minimum deposit requirement.
Unsecured cards with a high starting credit limit and secured cards that let you put down a large deposit and get a matching high credit limit will score the highest according to our “Ease of building credit” rubric and are more likely to appear on our list.

This is because a high credit limit can make it much easier to keep your credit utilization low, a primary credit-building factor that makes up 30 percent of your FICO credit score.
Secured cards have a slight advantage in this category since the maximum credit limit on a secured card tends to be much higher than the typical starting credit limit on an unsecured card that’s available with a bad or fair credit score. However, unsecured credit-building cards have the upper hand in another key aspect of building credit: accessibility.
Cards that carry no or a low deposit requirement can also receive a high score according to our “Ease of building credit” rubric since these cards offer a lower barrier to entry than secured cards that require you to put up hundreds of dollars in an upfront deposit.

Indeed, some users may prefer to pay a non-refundable $50 annual fee while they work on their credit score than tie up hundreds in a refundable security deposit.

We also evaluate each card’s benefits based on how useful they are for students or someone looking to build a positive credit history and save money on everyday spending.
We consider the inclusion of a rewards program, student-centric perks and access to your credit score or a credit monitoring service of prime importance, along with the ability to prequalify for the card with only a soft credit pull and a clear path to increase your credit limit or graduate to an unsecured or full-fledged rewards card.

Cards that include these benefits are likely to score higher according to our credit-building card scoring rubric.

Yes, you’ll have a hard credit pull when applying for the Mission Lane Visa card. Hard credit pulls may cause a temporary dip in your credit score, but it will resolve over time with responsible card use. 

You can gauge your approval odds and potentially pre-qualify through Bankrate’s CardMatch™ tool or through Mission Lane’s “See if I’ll Be Approved” form.