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

Capital One Platinum Secured Credit Card requires a security deposit to get started, but it also offers a unique level of flexibility: Depending on your creditworthiness, you could qualify for a deposit as low as $49 and get at least a $200 starting credit limit. Other security deposit amounts Capital One may request are $99 or $200, depending on creditworthiness. It’s not as high as the Mission Lane Green Line Visa’s credit limit, but it will cost you less. 

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, unlike the Mission Lane card’s non-refundable annual fee, the Capital One Platinum Secured is worth considering.

The Chase Freedom Rise® can be more accessible than a average unsecured card since it requires no credit history and you can get a maximum limit of up to $5,000, which is higher than most credit-building cards. While it also has a higher-than-average APR, it doesn't have an annual fee, and you can get 1.5 percent cash back on your spending. You'll likely start with a balance around $500, but there's a chance that you could receive a credit limit increase within the first year if you demonstrate good credit habits, such as paying on time and keeping your card balance low.

The Freedom Rise may not be as accessible to those with bad credit, but it can be a great starter card for those with fair credit or no credit history. If you feel confident in your ability to handle a standard credit card, you may want to make the leap.

Yes, you’ll have a hard credit pull when applying for the Mission Lane Green Line 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.

Like other credit-building instant approval cards, there’s a good chance you’ll quickly receive a decision when you submit your application for the Mission Lane Green Line Visa card. In fact, Mission Lane’s application page mentions you may be approved within 60 seconds, and the entire prequalification-to-approval process may only take five minutes.

Mission Lane may approve applicants with a bad to fair credit score or higher (a FICO score of at least 300 to 669). However, if your score is in the fair range or higher, you may find other rewards cards on the market that offer more perks than the Mission Lane Green Line Visa does, like cash back or other 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.