Having good credit is important in a lot of situations. Your credit can impact your ability to get a good place to live, as well as when applying for loans. Credit card companies see it as a measure of your ability to make a payment, but in some ways businesses look at it as a measure of your integrity – how well you keep the commitments you have made. If you plan on launching a business from your home sometime in the future, your credit suddenly becomes even more important. You may be capitalizing your own venture with borrowed funds, and your ability to do this could easily be the difference between success and failure.

If you've had sketchy credit in the past, fixing it up will present a challenge, and it will take some time but can be done. Since credit is usually built by making your loan payments in a timely way, and it is more difficult to get loans (especially good loans) when your credit is poor, your options for opening new credit-building accounts seem like they could be limited. Fortunately, there are some options which have been developed for just this situation.

In particular, you may wish to look into getting a prepaid credit card or a secured loan. For these products, you put the money you will be spending up front. For instance, you may give your bank two thousand dollars up front to secure your loan. Then they hand you two thousand dollars. As you pay them back with payments you make on time, they immediately release the money back to you. You pay only a small amount of interest and your credit goes up. A prepaid credit card works almost the same way. Both are good options, because they build your credit and demonstrate that you have made a priority of getting your payments in on time.

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