If you need a credit card for people with poor credit then the first step that you need to take is to check your credit and find just how poor it is, and whether or not you can fix it. Your chances of being approved for credit cards for people with poor credit are slim unless you can prove to the company that is offering the card that you are a safe risk to pay the credit card bill. This can be difficult if you have a history of not paying bills on your credit scores but there are a few options that are available to you.

The first thing to do before you even begin to check credit card offers for people with poor credit is to get a copy of your credit report. You can do this for free at the site set up by the credit bureaus to comply with the Free Credit Reporting Act at www.annualcreditreport.com or you can pay for a copy online. You need to find out if the items on your credit report are recent or old, and whether or not you can fix anything on your credit report by offering to pay it off if the original creditor or the collection agency now trying to collect it will remove it from your report.

If the information on your report is not recent then you may be able to get some type of credit now that you can use to build up a current credit history of paying your bills. We’ll discuss some of those in a minute. If the items that are recent are small in amount, you may be able to pay them off and get them removed completely. Then, you can go back to the first step mentioned in this paragraph and try to build up a recent history of paying on what credit you have so that credit cards for poor credit are easier to obtain.

One type of credit card for poor credit is the secured credit card. A secured credit card is one in which you put up a sum of money that is equal to the line of credit that you receive. Don’t confuse this with a pre-paid debit card, which is one in which you put money on the card and then use it with a pin number to spend. A secured credit card is a totally different animal and when you use the card you will need to make sure that you pay it off within the grace period to build good credit, just as you would with a regular credit card.

A cousin to this type of card is a partially secured credit card. This card, unlike the regular secured card where your credit limit is the same as the money you deposit, only requires that you put down part of the deposit. For instance, if you have a credit limit of $1000 you may only have to put down half of that amount of even twenty five percent of it. Either way, your deposit will usually be returned to you after a certain period of time, when you have used the card responsibly. For instance, a year of on time payments may cause you to get your deposit back, turning your secure card into a totally unsecured one.