SuperCash™ Card review: A good alternative to secured cards

The Petal 2 “Cash Back, No Fees” Visa Credit Card (issued by WebBank) is a solid unsecured card choice for avoiding credit card fees while earning cash back and building credit. You don’t need a credit history to open an account, and depending on your creditworthiness, you can get a credit limit between $300 and $10,000. This gives you potentially twice as much credit as you can deposit into your SuperCash account. 

However, the Petal 2 card has a regular APR of 18.24% - 32.24% (Variable). This means you’ll pay interest charges if you are late or miss payments, something you don’t have to worry about with the SuperCash card. 

The Discover it® Secured Credit Card is the most rewarding secured card option on the market. It earns 2 percent for gas station and restaurant purchases (up to $1,000 in combined purchases each quarter, 1 percent after) and 1 percent on all other purchases, making it a better rewards option than the SuperCash Mastercard. You’ll also get a match on all your cash back earnings at the end of your first cardmember year, which can provide outsized value.

However, you can only deposit between $200 and $2,500 into your card account to open a line of credit. This is half as much as you can deposit into your SuperCash card account. The Discover card also has a high interest rate of 27.74% Variable APR. If you need to carry a balance, you can get an intro APR of 10.99 percent on balance transfers for six months before the high APR takes effect.

The SuperCash Card is a good alternative to a secured card for those without a credit history. No credit check is needed, and it can help you build credit without the potential for debt or interest charges.

This card may offer solid value if you are willing to track limits and funding amounts or spend extra time earning rewards.

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.

You must be 18 years or older and have a Social Security number. No additional credit check or information is needed.

Yes. Once your identity is verified and you fund your account, you can add your card number to your virtual wallet for immediate use while waiting for your physical card to arrive.

Yes. You can get a cash advance of $20-$250 with no interest. Fees range from $3.99 to $6.99.