Avant Cashback Rewards Card review: Pricey credit-building and passable rewards

The Capital One Quicksilver One card offers the same opportunity as the Avant Cashback card — building credit while earning rewards — but with better perks.

You can earn 1.5 percent unlimited cash back with the Capital One QuicksilverOne card, versus the Avant Cashback card's 1 percent. Plus, you'll earn 5 percent cash back on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel. The Capital One QuicksilverOne card also comes with automatic credit limit increase reviews and a slightly lower variable APR of 29.74 percent.

The Capital One QuicksilverOne card charges a $39 annual fee (See Rates & Fees), making it easier to offset the fee with rewards. And after enough time of using the card responsibly, you may be able to upgrade to a better Capital One rewards card without a hard credit check. Avant doesn't offer any upgrade path.

The Upgrade Cash Rewards Visa card gives you a chance to pay off a balance in installments while building credit, all with no annual fee. In the meantime, you'll earn 1.5 percent unlimited cash back on all purchases as you pay them off. There's also a $200 welcome bonus after opening an Upgrade Rewards Checking account and making three debit card transactions.

The Upgrade Cash Rewards card can offer a variable APR as low as 14.99 percent, making it a better option if you need to carry a balance. But if you only have fair credit when applying, you may not get the best possible terms for the card.

Similar to Avant, Upgrade doesn't have a better version of the card to qualify for later down the road.

Avant cards are catered to applicants with fair or average credit scores. A fair FICO score runs between 580 and 669, with the average American's FICO score being 715. The other main credit-scoring model, VantageScore, considers a fair score to fall between 601 and 660.

However, you might still qualify for an Avant credit card with a bad credit score or no credit history.

An Avant credit card can be a good option for cardholders looking to practice responsible use and build their credit score over time. However, other credit-building card options may offer no annual fee, better rewards or more upgrade opportunities.

The type of Avant credit card you qualify for depends on your application, creditworthiness and so on. There's a basic version of the card with no rewards in addition to the Avant Cashback Rewards card above.

You may be offered a credit limit as high as $3,000 with an Avant card or as low as $300, depending on your financial status. The issuer also regularly reviews your account for potential credit line increases.

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.