As time goes on and you illustrate that you're able to handle your credit account, ask the bank for a card with a lower annual fee. They should be willing to give you one. Now you're packing plastic, and you're already scraping the paint off those shiny new numbers by running it through so many card machines. The bills are piling in, it seems, every month. A third sound strategy in maintaining credit health is to pay more than the monthly minimum on each bill.
Minimum payments are tiny little things.
They're designed that way because the more debt you carry, the more money the card issuer makes. Too, the more debt you have, the longer it's likely to take you to pay it down, which is more time the card issuer has to charge you interest and fees. When you receive those monthly statements, look at them. Check off every item you charged during the billing period, see what the total new charges comes to. Look at all the little things you bought that month, and at the big number they added up to.