My youngest attends a child care facility a couple of mornings a week so that me and the older one can do summer stuff that the younger isn't ready for. And their payment methods are personal check or Discover card. I haven't had a Discover card in more than fifteen years but one is needed for online payment.

So, I applied online for a Discover card last week. I haven't worked in four years so I didn't know how to fill out the salary information.

I checked "unemployed" but filled in my husband's annual salary ... give or take, I really haven't much idea what he makes ... along with our monthly mortgage payments, both numbers taken from our bank's online checking account history, and received instant approval. Scary.

I doubt they polled my previous account information from fifteen years ago or my full credit report but maybe they looked up my credit score, I dunno. I guess that I'm saying that I haven't any idea what the instant approval was based on ... probably more than the ratio of our mortgage to Jeff's salary ... but maybe not much more.

And the card arrived and I activated it and I put through a first payment for next week's child care costs.

Then I created the online account for the credit card with the bank account information for online payment and noticed that my available credit was already down the amount of next week's child care costs! Even though no history of the pending transaction is available. Mama mia that's fast! Good thing I activated the card before putting through the first payment ... I almost forgot to activate the card.

As you can tell, I don't get new credit cards very often. In fact, I haven't gotten a new credit card in six or seven years ... until this one! And as soon as our child care needs are over, at the end of the summer or at the end of the year, I'll cancel this card, probably. Although the silver color is more attractive than what they used to look like.