Establishing new tradelines can help overshadow derogatory marks, but understand you won’t get the same sort of limits and acceptance in banks until the big ones are removed. 

Credit mix accounts for 10% of the FICO pie chart, but its actually more important than that in terms of creating a thick/full credit profile. Lenders want to see installment loans, mortgage/housing payments, car loans, etc. The simplest way to handle this is to list out all the possible types of tradelines you can add then go do research on all the offers out there right now.

• Student loans- Not encouraging you to go get one but if you already have one, its valuable to keep up to date with payments. This will help with AAoA

• Car Payment- You could go lease a new/used car, or you could take over someone elses lease with a program like Swap A Lease or similar for a lot cheaper.

• Mortgage/Housing- Again not suggesting to go get a mortgage, instead take the last 5 years of rental history and get that reporting to your report through Rent reporters or similar.

• Utilities- You can get your utility payments reporting to at least your Experian report directly through your Experian account.

• Streaming services- This is another thing you are doing/using right now, so lets get it reporting to your credit and boost your score. We can use GrowCredit or similar. 

• Installment loans- Don’t want to open up some big crazy new loan, great start small with something like Self.inc or Credit Strong.

• Secured loans- Many banks offer this but the issue is they want to pull credit, credit unions are usually a better option and you have higher odds of getting, so NFCU offers a pledge loan, Penfed offers secure loans and so does DCU.

• Secured credit cards- Some people will argue the secured credit cards do more damage then good, I would only agree on a secured card that does NOT graduate. Here is full list of cards that graduate.

• Tradelines- With the rise of so many fintechs, this niche is pretty much dead but there are a few online only tradeline accounts that are still around, full list here.

Lastly if you have exhausted that list and/or want to get setup at a bigger bank, setup basic checking and savings, start to get some transactional history with them (hugely important) and then when the score is ready later, you already have history with them.

The hack here is that usually when you have a thin file or limited history it limits your credit options, but by establishing relationships and building up transactional history with the institution it ups your chances and puts you in prime position to later get credit products with them. This is more powerful at some banks vs others, like NFCU comes to mind when I think of a bank where this benefits you to a high degree.