Visa secured - Ascend Federal Credit Union

Visa secured is issued by Ascend Federal Credit Union, which publishes a purchase APR of 9.5%–18% for it.

The card in one paragraph

A secured card: the issuer holds a refundable deposit, usually equal to the credit line, and reports the account to the credit bureaus. The point is building or repairing a credit history, not borrowing cheaply.

The rate, in context and in money

In money rather than percentages: $1,000 left on this card for a year at 18% costs about $180 in interest, around $15 a month. That is simple interest on a flat balance, so read it as a scale rather than a bill — real interest compounds daily and moves with what you owe.

What it costs to hold and use

Foreign transactions cost 1%, applied to anything processed outside the US — including online purchases from foreign sellers. A late payment costs up to $25.

What is missing, and why

Ascend Federal Credit Union does not publish the annual fee on the page where this card appears. We have not filled those gaps with typical figures, because a plausible number is indistinguishable from a real one once it is printed beside a card.

The rates and fees for any card are disclosed in full before you submit an application, and the issuer has to give them to you then. If you want them beforehand, the issuer's cardholder agreements filed with the CFPB are linked on this page.

In short

The published rate of 9.5%–18% is the figure to weigh, and it only applies if you carry a balance. Clear the statement in full each month and the rate is irrelevant to what the card costs you.

The card name, the image and the application link on this page were read from Ascend Federal Credit Union's own website (product page). The rates and fees, where we show them, come from a different source entirely: the cardholder agreement the issuer filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Those two sources can disagree, and when they do the issuer's current offer is the one you would actually get. A filed agreement is a snapshot of the terms at the moment of filing; it is the best public record of what a card costs and it is not a quote. Read Ascend Federal Credit Union's current disclosure before you apply.

We join a filing to a product only when the names match on every meaningful word. Issuers file documents, not cards, so a great many filings cannot be tied to any one product — and an agreement attached to the wrong card would misstate the price of borrowing money. Those unmatched documents no longer get pages of their own on this site: a page named after a PDF is not something a reader can use. They remain published as documents, linked from this page and from the issuer's. How we read the filings.