<prompt> Human: When I needed to establish credit, I used a credit building loan. It worked great for me. They just auto deducted 50 from my account every month for over a year and at the end of the term I had a nice chuck of money that I dropped into a saving accout. I see where some people on here say it cost money, I think the net loss to me was around 10 bucks. I went from ZERO credit to a 785 score in like 8 months. What gives ??? A friend of mine tried to do the whole store credit card route it took her for ever to get credit establish. I told her about what my dad told me to do and she went to the same credit union, as far as I know she was very happy.  <response>: Because a secured credit card used properly costs nothing and accomplishes the same thing. 