Secured Credit Card Cardholder Agreement

The Secured Credit Card Cardholder Agreement filing from 1st Century Bank sets out a 17.99% purchase APR, a $19 annual fee and a 24.99% penalty rate. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 28th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

On the face of the filing

1st Century Bank filed this agreement for Secured Credit Card Cardholder Agreement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The filing runs 11 pages.

Terms captured from the document include a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, a penalty rate and an annual fee line.

Collateral and the deposit

Secured cards work against a deposit held by the issuer. The rate and fee figures summarised here say nothing about the size of that deposit or the terms attached to it, both of which are matters for the agreement text itself.

It is worth noting that collateral does not automatically mean a cheap rate: at 17.99%, this filing's purchase APR still sits at about the 28th percentile of the whole corpus, secured and unsecured filings alike.

The purchase APR against the corpus

Ranked against the corpus, this purchase APR — 17.99% — sits at approximately the 28th percentile and sits below the middle of the distribution.

Because the rate is variable, the figure quoted is tied to an index and will drift with it. Nothing here is a fixed commitment.

What the rate means in dollars

At the disclosed purchase APR, $5,000 revolving for a full year costs something like $985 in interest.

Priced at the median of 21.99%, that balance would generate about $1,229 in a year — so this agreement comes in around $244 cheaper for the same debt.

Per statement cycle that is on the order of $74.46 on $5,000, which is the number that actually shows up on a bill.

That maths assumes a static balance and nothing else — no payments, no additional purchases, no fees folded in.

What the card costs before you borrow

The annual fee is $19, charged whether or not the card is used. Against the filings here that disclose a fee, that sits at roughly the 77th percentile.

Expressed in the card's own terms, the $19 fee equals about a year's interest on a $106 balance at the disclosed 17.99% purchase rate.

Cash advances carry a cash advance APR of 24.99%. Cash is therefore 7 points dearer than buying something with the card.

The transfer fee is $10 or 3% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater; transferred balances then run at 17.99%. On $7,500 that fee is about $225 before any interest is charged.

Foreign transactions attract 3%. On $1,000 of overseas spending that is $30, charged on top of whatever exchange rate applies.

That is at the high end of this corpus — around the 91st percentile of disclosed foreign transaction fees.

The downside terms

A penalty APR of 24.99% sits in this filing, applied when the account falls into default as the agreement defines it. Against the 794 filings here that disclose one, that is roughly the 47th percentile.

The jump from 17.99% to 24.99% is 7 percentage points, worth roughly $260 extra per year on $3,000 of balance.

Late payments are capped at $24.50 under this filing, about the 20th percentile of late fee maximums in the corpus.

The grace period

The filing gives 25 days' grace on purchases, meaning a statement balance paid in full within that window attracts no interest.

What is outside the disclosure

More broadly, a CFPB agreement filing is a legal and pricing document. It does not describe rewards, benefits, sign-up offers, eligibility or approval criteria, and nothing of that kind has been inferred on this page. Where a card has features of that sort, they live outside this document entirely.

Go to the source

The original filing, 11 pages long, is linked on this page and should be read before any figure here is acted on. It is also a snapshot: issuers refile as terms change.

In short

At 17.99% the purchase rate is close to ordinary for this corpus; nothing in the rate table sets this filing far apart from its peers. Against that sits the $19 annual fee, which is unavoidable once the account is open.