Zolve Azpire Credit Builder Card review: Build credit with a debit card

The Capital One Platinum Secured card could be a terrific low-risk starter card. It charges no annual fee (See Rates & Fees) and only requires a small security deposit. While most secured cards only offer a credit limit equal to your security deposit, the Platinum Secured lets you put down a refundable deposit of $49, $99 or $200 for a possible $200 starting credit limit.

While you won’t earn any cash back with the card, it could be a more effective credit-building tool than the Azpire card since it reports credit utilization to credit bureaus. If you use the card for small purchases and quickly pay them off, you can maintain low credit utilization and gradually build a positive payment and credit history over time.

If you pay on time, maintain low card balances and use your card responsibly, you may even be eligible to upgrade to an unsecured Capital One card, such as the unsecured Capital One Platinum Credit Card or the Capital One Quicksilver Cash Rewards Credit Card, and get your deposit back.

Unlike the Zolve Azpire Credit-Builder Card, with which you earn rewards only with specific brands, the Discover it® Secured Credit Card earns cash back in popular everyday categories, such as gas stations and restaurants. Depending on your spending habits, you could earn rewards more consistently with this card. 

The Discover it® Secured Credit Card could also make it easier to build a positive credit history since it reports on credit utilization and gives you a chance at a high credit limit. You can receive a limit of up to $2,500 with a matching deposit, providing you ample flexibility to use the card for everyday purchases while keeping your credit utilization low. After seven months, Discover also initiates automatic reviews to determine if you can transition to an unsecured line of credit and have your deposit returned.

The card can even offer some peace of mind if you’re wary of credit card late fees and interest charges. You won’t be charged a fee the first time you pay late (though it’ll be up to $41 each time after that), and while you’ll face a high interest rate if you carry a balance, you won’t face a rate hike because of late payments. 

If you are willing to allocate funds to build credit using a debit card like the Zolve Azpire, a no-annual-fee secured card that earns rewards and offers a chance at a high limit like the Discover it® Secured Credit Card is worth considering.

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.

No, this card wasn’t a credit card since you couldn’t borrow money with it. Instead, it was a debit card, so you could only spend what was in your account, and you had to pay your balance in full.  

While you did need a Zolve account to use the Zolve Azpire Credit-Builder card, there was no minimum balance required.