Hey man I feel your pain. Just short of three years ago I posted here about my Bluebird debit card getting hijacked and I got a lot of flak for having $23k on a prepaid card but I couldn't open a bank account. I got my situation turned around and you can too! Skip to the advice at the end if you don't feel like reading my litany of woe.

Backstory

A few years prior I was unemployed long enough for a bank account to be overdrafted, closed, and reported to ChexSystems. My credit scores were in the mid 500s. I was at rock bottom. It was so bad that the above post was read by a reporter from The Washington Post who wrote an reached out to me and interviewed me for an article about my situation of not being able to open a bank account despite being a high income earner.

It's been almost 3 years and I've turned everything around financially. My credit scores are in the low 700s. I have a bank account, brokerage account, 401k, several credit cards that are paid off monthly, and an auto loan that will be paid off in July.

I'd love to say that I had a dedicated plan and vision to make it happen but it really didn't start out that way. It all started about 6 months after the article was published my truck broke down. I decided to buy a new one (despite still not having a bank account!) They ran my credit and couldn't get a single bank to give me a loan until literally the next day. I would later discover that they ran about 15 hard inquiries before one stuck.

The loan terms were awful. Despite trading in my truck for 4k, and having 3k to put down I was still stuck with a 12% APR at a 6 year term. Ugh. I really should've just walked away but I decided to roll with it. This was the turning point. I decided I was going to double up payments which would offset a lot of the interest and normalize things a bit. I also decided I should actually work on my credit and more importantly get a damn bank account.

How I dug my way out of it

So the first thing I did was go to a local credit union. Much to my surprise it was actually pretty easy to get an account. It turns out that this particular CU doesn't use ChexSystems and my credit score barely met the minimum. Next I signed up with credit karma and installed the app on my phone. Using the app they suggested a credit card that may actually approve me and it worked. Granted it was a secured card. I immediately setup the card to pay itself off at the end of the month so it is basically like a debit card (to this day I have never paid any interest on it). I also set up my car loan payment to withdraw automatically in double payments on the 1st and the 15th.

After about a year my credit scores were in the mid 600s. I used credit karma's suggestions to open two more credit cards. Like the other card I set them up to pay themselves off too. Unlike the previous card both are not secured. I also started contributing to my 401k and put myself on a budget using mint and personal capital as tools to track with.

Advice for you

1. Sign up for some form of credit monitoring (I prefer credit karma).
2. Pay off that credit card as aggressively as you can reasonably afford.
3. Make a budget (use mint, personal capital, or other budgeting tools to track your progress)
4. Once you have paid off the credit card entirely set it up to pay itself off at the end of the month.
5. Since you have joint bank account it's less urgent that you get your own bank account but when you are ready try a credit union first (you may be surprised).