App-O-Rama lama ding dong

Sharing the results of my recent app-o-rama:

goal: to gain as much 0% cash w/no fee as possible. Based on this thread, my method is to request large Balance Transfers to help achieve large credit lines. To get the cash off the card and into the bank, I did all BTs to various Credit Union cards that offer no-fee cash advance convenience checks. I also BT'd to various MBNA cards that can send cash to these CU cards through MBNA Billpay. **NOTE: DO NOT DO THIS. IT DID NOT WORK. SEE POST ON 4/15 and 5/4** Before the demise of the Penfed CD deal, I would have purchased CDs for the amount with my MBNA Fidelity/529 2% rebate card.

2nd goal: cash bonuses for applications through cardoffers.com

planning: I paid down all 0% BTs and waited for CRs to update. But, due to the Penfed CD deal expiring in mid Feb, I was caught without a method of washing the BT funds. So I joined 4 credit unions and applied for their credit cards in order to have someplace to BT to. I did not want to wait for aging and bumpage to remove the hard inquiries because NONE of the CUs had reported the new credit cards yet, and I decided a few recent inquiries was better than showing $100K in new credit card limits!

All applications were entered on Monday between 9am-2pm ET. I tried to only apply for a single card from each issuer, but did apply for a Chase card and a Bank One card (now the same company)


FAKO scores: EQ:693 EX:695 TR:712
ACTUAL EQ:768!

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Capital One Business Platinum VISA
0% BT for 12 months. requested $20K BT
pulled ALL THREE CRs Tuesday
told to wait 7 days for written response. waited 3 weeks and
APPROVED $12K line

Amex In:NYC card
0% BT for 6 months. requested $24.5K BT
pulled TR same day
APPROVED instantly $25K line
$30 bonus from cardoffers.com

Citi Upromise
0% BT for 12 months. no request for BT on app
pulled EQ same day
told to wait for written response. called 800#, APPROVED $4.5K line. Once card arrives I will reallocate from other cards before asking for BT.
$40 bonus from cardoffers.com

Discover Gold Card
0% BT for 12 months. requested $25K
pulled EX Tuesday and EQ&TR on Thursday!
told to wait 30 days for written response.
$40 bonues from cardoffers.com if approved
update: phone call from Discover Friday 4pm verifying info. Since I use VOIP they could not verify my home phone #. Asked for the main phone # of my office (as opposed to my direct line)
APPROVED $6K line. I was able to reallocate from an existing card to increase it.

GM Mastercard
0% BT for 12 months. requested $25K
pulled ??
told to wait 10-14 days for written response. no update as of today from online status.
$20 bonus from cardoffers.com if approved
DECLINED - already have a GM Card. Offered to consolidate/cancel, but my available credit exceeds my income and they will not offer a new card.

Chase Cashbuilder
0% BT for 12 months. requested $25K
pulled TR Tuesday
told to wait for written response. called 800#, spoke to underwriter. Agreed to close $11K Chase card and lower BankOne Amazon card from $6.5K to $2.5K.
APPROVED for $25.2K

Bank One targeted offer
0% BT for 14 months. requested $25K
pulled TR same day (listed as FirstUSA. thanks deals4travel)
told to wait for written response. According to 800#, APPROVED $11K on Friday with BT of $10.5K

Providian Pay-Pal VISA targeted offer
0% BT for 11 months. requested $25K
pulled TR same day
told to wait for written response. According to 800#, APPROVED for $15K with BT of $14.5K

National City Diamond Elite VISA
0% BT for 6 months. requested %30K. website not working, applied by phone
pulled TR same day
APPROVED for $10K with BT of $9.5K

1st National Bank of Omaha
0% BT for 6 months. requested $30K
pulled ??
told to wait for written response. called Thurs afternoon and due to "high number of internet apps" had not even looked at mine yet. Also said they had 3 apps from me (one was internet crash on their end, the other is Hibernia card below). Said they will only process 1 and will have a decision in 2 weeks.
DECLINED - too many inquiries

Hibernia SmartOne VISA
0% BT for 6 months. requested $30K
pulled ??
told to wait for written response (note: website app looked identical to 1st Nat'l Omaha. are these the same company??)
note #2: see above. This app was cancelled by issuer because of app for 1st Nat'l bank of Omaha

Juniper Caesar's Mastercard
0% BT for 6 months. requested $20K
pulled TR & EX same day
DENIED. "Excessive credit applications"

HSBC Platinum VISA
0% BT for 6 months. requested $40K
pulled EQ same day
APPROVED $1.5K line. I plan to call and ask for an increase or will cancel card.
update Monday: received card, called to ask for credit line increase. CSR said they would run another credit check, I declined. Offered to transfer to a manager, sat on hold for 15 minutes and gave up. Called back later and cancelled the card without activating.

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I got hard pulls from "Infibank" and "First USA" and I don't know which cards they go with. First USA is gone, and I've never heard of Infibank. Can anyone shed some light?

I will update this post as the responses come in...

edit: added BankOne CR inquiry (listed as FirstUSA)
edit #2: added First Nat'l Bank Omaha /Hibernia account status
edit #3: added approval from Bank One
edit #4: added updated info from Discover
edit #5: added my cancellation of HSBC card
edit #6: added delines from Household GM and 1st Nat'l Omaha
edit #7: added approval from Capital One business card 4/8/05
edit #8: added approval from Discover card on 4/11/05
edit #9: added important note re: Credit Union credit cards 4/15/05

You should've posted in in the app-o-rama thread. No need for this clutter.

Derffie said: I like that this particular persons apporama is being kept separate.. easier to follow the result.. thanks for making your post so well organized.. and good luck
What he said )

davelanton said: Sharing the results of my recent app-o-rama:

 

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I got hard pulls from "Infibank" and "First USA" and I don't know which cards they go with. First USA is gone, and I've never heard of Infibank. Can anyone shed some light?

I will update this post as the responses come in...

"InfiBank, N.A. provides financial institutions with the ability to realize all the benefits of a competitive credit card program without the inherent responsibilities of issuance." It was most likely a hard pull for one of the credit unioin cards you have applied for underwritten by Infibank.

Bank one still posts hard pulls as first usa.

davelanton said: website app looked identical to 1st Nat'l Omaha. are these the same company??)Yes.

Thx for the detail on your experience. I'd have missed this in a pre-existing thread.

Thought:

Would it be better to do this on a Tue on the premise that you're less likely to compete w/ weekend backlog in the approval departments, thus avoiding CR-pull timing risk?

Principal bank & teacher's credit union have infibank credit card
Text

ratchtjaw said: What credit unions did you join that gave such generous credit limits?

Pentagon Federal Credit Union $30K line
Schools FCU $18K line
Addison Avenue FCU $10K line

and a couple of others that are from my employer and my family members' employers.

may I ask some basic questions about your credit history before your App-O-Rama?

what is your age, your current household income, how many CC you had before hand, how high were the limits on those CC before hand.

I ask that becuase when I apply for new cards my limit tend to be on the low end near 5k while i am young and i understand why. I wonder how people get those 25k limit to start.

denbo32 said: may I ask some basic questions about your credit history before your App-O-Rama?

what is your age, your current household income, how many CC you had before hand, how high were the limits on those CC before hand.

I ask that becuase when I apply for new cards my limit tend to be on the low end near 5k while i am young and i understand why. I wonder how people get those 25k limit to start.
Age: 34
income: approx $100K
# cards: many (more than 12) credit lines running from $5K - $22K

My experience with Credit Unions has been that they are more generous than traditional issuers, but are also more likely to verify income. On most of the recent cards I received, I had to fax or mail W-2 or paystubs. But, the formulas the CUs use to figure the credit line can be 3x or 4x gross monthly income!

davelanton said: Bagofchips said: Thx for the detail on your experience. I'd have missed this in a pre-existing thread.

Thought:

Would it be better to do this on a Tue on the premise that you're less likely to compete w/ weekend backlog in the approval departments, thus avoiding CR-pull timing risk?

Perhaps. Many of the internet apps were instant pulls, but based on what I had read here and other places, I expected the phone apps to do an instant pull. Since Cap One pulled all 3 and took their sweet time doing it, I'm almost positive they will decline me.

And actually come to think of it Monday's probably not completely immune either. It is a the busiest day for opening bank accounts, I know that. Thinking Wednesday early a.m.

Dave -- great post. I like the level of detail you provided. Very helpful.

Fotomaniak: His scores will drop 25-40 points from the inquiries. Then they'll hemmorage and drop another 60-80 because of the maxed out cards reporting 90+% utilization. No big deal. And, yep, those same scores would rocket back up if the balance was paid down to just under 50%.

manuel said: Depending on ur prior record the probable much lower average age will hurt you quite a bit too - given this I'd vote for keeping them maxed out. That and the amount of new apps makes me guess you won't get much more credit soon anyhow - at least that's been my experience. No biggie, most will be forgiven when u pay them off and the age will be forgiven over time.

Great post.
to increase the average age you can consolidate the new accounts in to the older accounts from the same card issuers.

fotomaniak said: So you've got $50K to play with for 12 month.
that's about $1K after tax
not bad
do you have Emigrant Savings account? if not, time to open one, unless you can get a better rate for 1 yr CD.
Yep, started the process for the Emigrant account about a week before the app-o-rama. just waiting on my acct # in the mail now.
your scores probably going to drop by 50+ points, because several of your cards are close to 100% utilization.
Which means that you will have a hard time getting any cards, until you pay off the existing ones.

What if, instead of maxing out the 0% offers, you paid them down to less than 50% utilization? I wonder if this would bring your scores back to "normal".
That was my original intention. I was going to pay down each card to 50%, or reallocate credit from existing cards and pay down just a portion to bring it to 50%. I fear doing that with AMEX, as people have reported account reviews for credit lines over $25K in this thread.. But as it has been mentioned, my score is pretty much trashed anyway from the # of inquiries and the young age of accounts. So now I'm on the fence.

I think I may keep the 6 month cards maxed out, but pay down the 12 month cards to 50% to help minimize the damage. I also don't want to trigger any account reviews or closures from other issuers. On the other hand, with the new Credit Union cards, my overall utilization will still be low, even with a few maxed out cards.

EugeneV said: Did you try to double the bonus by ordering their customized report? I wonder what to put on that report so that they would recommend most cards to you (that you would want to apply for), since you get double bonus only on their recommendations.
Yes. But it doesn't matter what cards it recommends, you get the bonus on all cards just by paying for the report. So I ran the report, and then went and applied for the cards I had already researched on my own.

davelanton said: Update on my scores for those of you who are interested:

App-o-rama was on Monday 3/14. As of Friday 3/18 my FAKO scores are:

EX: 674 (showing 9 inquiries)
EQ: 681 (showing 12 inquiries)
TR: 682 (showing 9 inquiries)

None of the new accounts have been listed yet. The score drop is just from the inquiries.

It's interesting to me how far apart the actual score was from the FAKO score. I had a 75 point descrepancy on EQ (the only true score I accessed) I think it may be related to the aging factor. Privacyguard lists my average age of accounts at something like 4 years 6 months. But when I closed 4 MBNA HGW1/4 cards last year, the average age did not change. Has anyone else experienced this?

My FAKOs are consistently about 50 points lower than my FICOs. But I'll be curious to see what they are once the accounts are reported.

veryhungry said: what state are you in?

would help track which card pulled which report for your state.
NJ. And I plan to enter my findings on whopulledmycredit.com

tmdlkwd said: For those that did an App O Rama and OP as well....If you applied for more than 1 cc from a new issuer, how many hard Pulls did you get ?
Applied for Chase card and Bank One card (now the same company). Two hard pulls. But this may be the odd one out, as their systems are not fully merged yet.

I have also applied for Bank one and chase and both of them do a hard pull (Bank one as FirstUsa) and both pulled from transunion

I have been told their systems will not merge till July at the earliest

davelanton said: SoBeyondTheNorm said: Out of curiousity, were the 2 hard pulls on the same bureau? Which bureau(s)?
please refer to my original post

ah ok. Thanks. Looks like BankOne is now pulling TU in many states where they used to pull EQ.

Hard to calculate time spent; I did all my research during downtime at work. Profit is based on prevailing interest rate of savings/checking acct each month (Presidential/Emigrant/Lockheed).

rough estimate for 1st 6 months: $380/month (at 3.5%) or $433/month (at 4%)
rough estimate for 2nd 6 months: $300/month (at 4%) or $??? as rates rise

Amount decreases because some of the 0% are for 6 month, not 12 month. These amounts are also pretax (so actual profit is lower).