STOP. You might want read Rasher's better AOR instead. (Link)
My AOR was heavily influenced by his and I leaned heavily on his research. I am posting this because some members seem to want the data, so others can learn from my mistakes, and so veterans can help me understand the game better.
Purpose: 1. Learn the game 2. Take advantage of 0% BT offers 3. Bonus rewards and incentives
Existing Personal Accounts: Chase Freedom Card (aka Perfect Card) - Opened 1993 - $26,500 CL before AOR. $6500 after (moved $15,000 to Sony) American Express Blue Cash - Opened 2004 - $30,000 CL. FIA 529 College Rewards Matercard (Authorized User) - Opened 2005 - $13,200 CL.
Existing Business Accounts: Chase Business Platinum - Opened 2006 - $17,600 CL Ameican Express Platinum Business - Opened 2006 - $16,000 CL
Personal Info: Age: 33 Household income: $130,000 (2006) House Payment: $1200 TrueCredit.com before AOR: Unknown TrueCredit.com 5 days after AOR: 761 (TransUnion), 765 (Experian), 732 (Equifax)
Plan: 1. Grab the bonuses and 0% cash and stuff them in E-Loan savings. 2. Acquire more 0% purchase lines to complement the existing Chase Business 0% card with six months to run which is more or less maxed out with business inventory purchases.
Personal Cards Targeted/Reason: Kroger 1-2-3 Rewards ----------------------------- Low BT fee, may use rewards program later Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards AMEX ------ $100 bonus, no fee BT Chase Sony Visa Card --------------------------- $100 bonus, card comes with BT check for easy BT to checking. Discover Gas Card -------------------------------- 0% purchases and BT with no fee, 5% discount on gas. PNC Select Rewards Visa Platinum Card ---- 0% no fee BT
Business Cards Targeted/Reason: UPS Capital Business Visa Rewards Card---------- 0% purchases/0% BT, discount on UPS shipping Advanta Platinum Business Card with Rewards --- 0% BT with $50 max fee for 15 months, $50 cardoffers CitiBusiness with TY Network Card -------------------- 15k points, offers no fee 0% delayed BT option AMEX Starwood Preferred Business Card ------------ Not a 0% card but valuable (to me) even with $30 annual fee
New Credit Issued (to date): $ 6,500 Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards American Express #1 (Instant) - 6,500 Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards American Express #2 (Surprise deferred approval) 10,000 Sony Visa by Chase (Instant) 10,000 PNC Select Rewards Visa Platinum (Instant) 10,500 Kroger 1-2-3 Rewards (Instant) 25,000 UPS Capital Business Visa Rewards Card (Deferred approval) 10,000 Advanta Platinum Business Card with Rewards (Deferred approval) 13,500 CitiBusiness with TY Network Card (Deferred approval) - 8,000 Discover Gas Card (Deferred approval) 22,000 AMEX Starwood Preferred Business Card (Instant) ----------- $122,500
Total Rewards: $ 100 Gift card - Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards American Express #1 -- 100 Gift card - Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards American Express #2 -- 100 Credit - Sony Visa by Chase --- 50 Card offers - Advanta Platinum Business Card with Rewards -- 150 Gift card - CitiBusiness with TY Network Card -------- $ 500
10,000 Starwood Points
AOR Date: January 13-14, 2007
Yes, I think it would be better to apply on a weekday or at least not a weekend before a bank holiday, but I had the time so I pulled the trigger.
Lessons: Although I don't have all the decisions in yet, I think I would have done better if I had signed up for TrueCredit first and discovered I was not doing as well with Equifax as the other bureaus.
A Citi application that results in a web error may well end up as a surprise card in your mail box.
Be careful sending a negative balance to AMEX. Getting a check out of them may not be as easy as you think and others have warned about a possible AMEX financial review.
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Thanks for posting. I'm studying AORs so every bit of info helps.
Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards American Express/$100 bonus, no fee BT This card is showing $50 bonus after purchase and max $250 BT fee here. Do you have a link to some other offer?
In retrospect I clearly should have subscried to TrueCredit before I did the AOR. I think this would have alerted me that my Equifax score was out of kilter with my other scores. Citi and Kroger both pulled Equifax (according to TrueCredit). My Citi peronsal line is only $6500 so I don't hold high hopes for a high Kroger line either. As it is, I only found out about Equifax after the fact.
I am currently using TrueCredit to pull all three credit reports about every 24 hours for the bumpage effect. As I understand it, bumpage is intentionally creating a bunch of soft pulls to "bump" hard pulls off your credit report. And why do I care? Because hard inquiries lower your score. Only problem with bumpage is it doesn't work with Experian.
Here's more about bumpage. I don't know if that link will be allowed, if it isn't just Google "bumpage" and you'll get the idea. By the way, if you are thinking about TrueCredit, don't pay full price! This is FatWallet, right? Link through Wal-Mart to pay $11.21 per month. Do watch out for overcharges, however this wasn't a problem for me. At least not the first month.
I think the trick is to apply with offer code: F1N9
Here are the rest of my notes on that card: ANNUAL FEE: 0 0% PURCHASE? No 0% BT TERM? Until 1/1/08 0% BT FEE? None! REWARDS: 5% gas, drugs, supermarkets for 12 months, after that flat 1% BONUSES: $100 gift card after first purchase (restaurants)
Although I got a meager CL with this card, I think it will still be useful. The $100 bonus is clearly a plus and the no fee BT makes any CL useful. Also, I understand it's good to have Citi cards around to use to cash out other cards that make it difficult to actually get the cash out of the card.
In short, my plan is to make a purchase on this card to trigger the reward, payoff the purchase, possibly receive a BT from another card (if necessary), request a refund of the negative balance, then BT to my checking account. I don't know if that's possible or not, but I'll stick with that plan until I find out otherwise.
Update
I received two of these cards. I remember when I filled out the application online it ended with an error, so I filled it out again. Apparently both went through and both were approved, though for only $6500 each. Luckily, this is a great card for this particular situation. Both cards should get a bonus and both cards should have a BT with no BT fee so even though I have small lines on these cards I can put them to use for profit. Although I did this accidentally, maybe it's a good strategy to target this kind of card more than once per AOR.
In retrospect I clearly should have subscried to TrueCredit before I did the AOR. I think this would have alerted me that my Equifax score was out of kilter with my other scores. Citi and Kroger both pulled Equifax (according to TrueCredit). My Citi peronsal line is only $6500 so I don't hold high hopes for a high Kroger line either. As it is, I only found out about Equifax after the fact.
I am currently using TrueCredit to pull all three credit reports about every 24 hours for the bumpage effect. As I understand it, bumpage is intentionally creating a bunch of soft pulls to "bump" hard pulls off your credit report. And why do I care? Because hard inquiries lower your score. Only problem with bumpage is it doesn't work with Experian.
Here's more about bumpage. I don't know if that link will be allowed, if it isn't just Google "bumpage" and you'll get the idea. By the way, if you are thinking about TrueCredit, don't pay full price! This is FatWallet, right? Link through Wal-Mart to pay $11.21 per month. Do watch out for overcharges, however this wasn't a problem for me. At least not the first month.
Actually I think your equifax score was fine. 732 is a good score. I am sure ou will do well with the totals of the cards you got. I am trying to knock inquires off myself. What is the ideal number of inquires showing before you start an AOR. I want to do a business AOR and maybe get some line oncreases on my next few. I want to focus on the business cards over the personal ones. Also I never heard of the UPS credit card. My business does huge business with UPS but we get billed once a week under a UPS discount program. I wonder how you can use this credit card with those charges. It would save us a few thousand per year. Do you know more about it? Let me know
Here are my notes on the card, but I don't know the answer to your question. I haven't looked into it that much and I think I have a good chance of being declined anyway since I already have a Chase Business account and two Chase personal accounts.
My UPS account is not a daily pickup account and I get an individual invoice for each shipment I make so our situations are not the same. I rarely ship UPS though our other location uses it more often. If I get the card, I'll try to figure out how to make it work for me, but the main idea with this card is just to rack up the spending at 0%.
This is off the subject but at my office I ship mostly FedEx and charge to the AMEX Business Platinum. That gives me an instant 5% OPEN discount off my already discounted FedEx rate plus a small extra annual CashBack award. I don't recommend you do that however because I'm a UPS stockholder.
Applied 1/13/07. Decision via US Mail on 1/30/2007. Approved for $25,000.
Edit: My original notes stated that there was no 0% BT offer with this card, however when the card arrived the card carrier had a BT check attached (similar to Sony card). When I looked at the terms I was surprised to find that the card does indeed have a 0% BT offer (3%/$75 cap).
ANNUAL FEE: 0 0% PURCHASE? 12 months 0% BT TERM? 12 months 0% BT FEE? 3% max $75 REWARDS: 1% towards Sony BONUSES: $100 card credit after purchase of at least $1 FW THREAD: Link
Instant approval with temporary $5000 credit line. Card showed online at $10,000 CL 1/21/07 Reallocated $15,000 from Chase Freedom Card (Perfect Card). Now have $25,000 CL and down to $6500 on Freedom card.
The card arrived quickly. When I called the CSR asked me if I wanted to BT but I declined citing the check. The CSR mentioned BT'ing to my checking account but quickly said I wasn't eligible. I didn't ask why. I called later to reallocate my credit to Sony and asked the CSR if I could deposit the check into my checking account to pay off my car loan. I don't have a car loan but I didn't think it would be a great idea to tell her the real reason. She said it was a good idea since finance companies will often not accept convenience checks. So now the only question is how much of the $25,000 am I going to actually use.
That's where I realize I'm at the end of my knowledge on how to do this. I've seen the magic numbers of 49% and 89% mentioned but I don't know their significance. I do understand about keeping my overall debt ratio low to keep the credit score up, but I don't understand the impact of having high utilization on one card while letting keeping my overall ratios decent. Also, I wouldn't mind a high utilization (and low score) if I could quickly fix the damage by paying down the line.
I will probably opt for high utilization here and just see what happens.
Oh, one final thing. I made a gas purchase with the Sony card today for $1.01. In the FW thread I read that a purchase of $1.00 triggers the $100 credit. I don't know if it's true or just lore, but I figured I could spare a buck to find out. The original plan was to spend about a quarter.
Thanks for the info. We have a Fedex ground account also but we use it less these days. We have AMEX plat. Not sure if fedex will allow s to pay by cc but will look into it anyway for a 5% savings plus the points.
PugRanch said:In retrospect I clearly should have subscried to TrueCredit before I did the AOR. I think this would have alerted me that my Equifax score was out of kilter with my other scores.
That's a perfectly logical conclusion ... and probably wrong.
TrueCredit uses its own scoring model and applies it to data from all 3 CRAs. That scoring model doesn't even match TransUnion (the owner of TrueCredit), much less the other 2.
Case in point: TrueCredit reports my Equifax score as much higher than the other 2 -- whereas my true Equifax score (that I pay for) is more in line with the others. The only real difference in the underlying data: Equifax seems to have dropped most of my closed accounts, artificially boosting TrueCredit's lame calculation.
CardJuggler, thanks for your input. I avoided calling the TrueCredit scores FICOs because I know they aren't the real thing. I'm using them for "indication only". I do suspect Equifax is my weakest bureau based on the one Citi CL I know so far. I am very interested to see what kind of line I get from Kroger.
Awww shucks... Thanks for the credit in your OP. Like you, I just decided to go for it and BT up to but not exceeding 89% of my available CLs on the good cards. I'll sort it all out later, but my suspicion is that my total utilization will be less than 49% well I add up all of the crappy (older) cards I have that will have 0% utilization. Nice informative post, I like the listings of which cards pull from which credit reporting agency. Of course, I'm too cheap to pay anyone to give me my credit report, but I guess I'll have to reconsider that when I need to start using bumpage to fix my CR...
Congrats on joining the club! I think the 50%/90% numbers are generally taken as follows: 1) overall utilization (all balances / all CLs) >50% = mighty bad 2) single card utilization >90% = somewhat bad (the experts will be here shortly to weigh in). I'm planning to have 89% untilization on the largest CL card, and do the others such that my overall utilization is more in line with DaveHansen recommended 50%.
As far as ACh from SONY card, a CSR told me that one needs to have the card for 3 mos. before Chase would do it (same CSR told me that you get 0% for 12 mos. beginning on the date of the ACH, but you never know).
Would you mind telling how many hard inq. you had before the AOR. Asking b/c I have 4 at the moment. The two will be gone Mar 1, but I want to start my AOR before then (early Feb), before some of the good offers I have expire ...
Cyberkost, thanks for your insight into utilization. The numbers you suggested sound reasonable and I think I'll use them as targets. Although it's tempting, I'm trying not to overdo this AOR thing because I am a novice and I don't want to magnify my mistakes and also because I want to avoid completely butchering my credit scores. I think of the worst case scenario where I want or need to move on fairly short notice. I don't want to be seen as huge risk to lenders.
My hunch is that if I can get a lot of the inquiries off in around 90 days with bumpage then I'll be able to quickly raise my score by paying off all the debts if I have to. But that's just a hunch. I'm still learning here. It would be easy to argue that I should have done more research upfront but I learn better by doing.
To answer your question, I had six inquiries in the two year period before the AOR: UMB DEBT 01/09/2007 TransUnion - Believe this is related to Scottrade SCOTTRADE 12/15/2006 Equifax - Scottrade account 2 SPRINTNXTL 06/12/2006 Equifax - Sprint SERO PCS plan BKONE 05/25/2006 Equifax - Chase Platinum Business AMEX 03/29/2006 Equifax - AMEX Business Platinum (with $250 bonus!) SCOTTRADE 07/26/2005 Equifax - Scottrade account 1
I wrote myself a $20,000 check today on the Chase Sony card. I felt like a criminal depositing it at the credit union although I don't know why -- I had permission from Chase. My Credit Union puts five day hold on checks over $5,000 but I expected that. They used to hold some of my expense reimbursement checks from my business though I finally got them to stop. I didn't even bother asking the to waive the hold on the Chase check. I don't think they would have done it.
That should put me at $20,000 (check) + $1.01 (gas) + $75 (BT fee) = $20,076/25,000 = 80% utilization on this card. Hopefully the mostly unused AMEX Blue Cash $30,000 CL will shield me from too much credit score damage.
cyberkost said:Congrats on joining the club! I think the 50%/90% numbers are generally taken as follows: 1) overall utilization (all balances / all CLs) >50% = mighty bad 2) single card utilization >90% = somewhat bad (the experts will be here shortly to weigh in). I'm planning to have 89% untilization on the largest CL card, and do the others such that my overall utilization is more in line with DaveHansen recommended 50%.
As far as ACh from SONY card, a CSR told me that one needs to have the card for 3 mos. before Chase would do it (same CSR told me that you get 0% for 12 mos. beginning on the date of the ACH, but you never know).
Would you mind telling how many hard inq. you had before the AOR. Asking b/c I have 4 at the moment. The two will be gone Mar 1, but I want to start my AOR before then (early Feb), before some of the good offers I have expire ...Just as an additional point of reference on utilization:
Discover approved my card and offered a transaction of 100% of the credit line. I took it. I know that goes against conventional wisdom to have over 90% utilization on a single card but my perception is that individual creditors get squirrely when you get that high and may change the terms of your agreement to be punitive. The Discover CSR said they had no such concerns with their cards so I went ahead and did it.
Pugranch, thanks for the info! I wonder how they're going to treat the $75 fee. I would hate if they treat it as a purchase (with all the interest that goes with it).
cyberkost said:Pugranch, thanks for the info! I wonder how they're going to treat the $75 fee. I would hate if they treat it as a purchase (with all the interest that goes with it).
On the Sony Card, the interest on purchases is 0% for the first year.
I've only encountered one issuer that doesn't roll the fee into the promo BT rate, that being BofA which charges it at cash advance rates. Even so we're talking about ~$2/month, hardly a deal killer.
Cyberkost, the Sony card has 0% on purchases as well so it shouldn't be an issue. But that's a good question in the general case and one which I can't answer.
Speaking of the Sony card, WalStMonky report back in Rasher's thread that some have been able to get the $75 waived. I'd probably give it a try if I were BT'ing over the phone, but since I used the convenience check I don't think I'll try it. I'm not that great at sweet talking CSRs.
Edit: Speak of the devil. Not only does Mr. Monky know the answer but he types faster than me too.
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