 TITLE: Can I Get a Credit Card After Bankruptcy? CONTENT: How Bankruptcy Affects Credit\n-----------------------------\nA bankruptcy filing is the most severe negative event that can appear in a credit report, and it can do deep, long-lasting damage to your credit scores.\nA Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which eliminates all your debts, stays on your credit report for up to 10 years. A Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which restructures your debts and provides creditors partial repayment, will remain on your credit report for up to seven years.\nWhen you file for bankruptcy, the best your creditors can expect to collect is a fraction of the money you owe them. (In a Chapter 7 filing, creditors may get nothing at all.) It's understandable, then, that bankruptcy typically makes lenders wary of issuing you new credit. Some lenders turn down any credit applicant with a bankruptcy on their credit report. Other lenders will consider applicants with older bankruptcy entries, but typically charge high interest rates and fees because they consider bankruptcy filers risky borrowers.\nAs long as a bankruptcy appears on your credit reports, it will tend to lower your credit scores. But its impact on your scores will diminish over time. Credit scoring models such as those from FICO and VantageScore® give new information greater weight than older information, so adopting good credit habits can help you start rebuilding your credit scores, even immediately after you've filed for bankruptcy.\nKey steps to improving credit scores, after bankruptcy or under any other circumstances, include avoiding excessive debt and high card balances and, most importantly, establishing a record of steady, on-time debt payments on your credit reports. So how do you rack up steady payments if bankruptcy has made lenders reluctant to work with you? The key is to focus on credit cards for people with less-than-ideal credit, or even cards that require no credit at all. END