bouledogue said:Anyone know what the ding to my FICO score would be by closing that account and how long it would take to bring my score back up? [I will not be buying a house any time soon and do not plan to using financing for major purchases such as a car.] I know that debt to credit ratio, the amount of debt, and credit history are the major contributing factors to the FICO score; I just wonder how much of a hit one would take by closing their oldest card.

Also, is it really impossible to consolidate a personal card (platinum select visa) to a business card (professional visa)?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

It shouldn't have any effect (score-wise, anyway) until it drops off your report 7 years from now. Until then, it will continue to age and show as your oldest account. 7 years from now the effect will likely be small if you have a robust credit profile.

I believe is it possible to consolidate personal CL into business at Citi, but not the other way around.

I called earlier this week to reallocate all but $1,000 on my Citi Platinum Select to my new CitiUpromise to take advantage of the $0 fee 0% APR BT promotion and was approved by the CSR. After a few days of not seeing the change online, I called back and was told by a CSR that reallocations are not allowed on 0% APR BTs.

UPDATE:
...same thing happened with my fiance's transfer I talked about before and she was told the same thing.

Topgear said:So anyway i had him go ahead and try to do a request of reallocating from my 2 other new citi cards with 0% offers, to my at$t card, he said he thinks this time the reallocation should work because he thinks it was my old cards fault when it came to the other requests, however i am not getting my hopes up, 3 failures in a row makes me very skeptical. I will post again if it actually works.

I already tried to reallocate from a non-0% card to a non-0% card, and it didn't go through. I can see why they're shutting down reallocation to 0% cards, but preventing other re-allocations makes no sense at all. I ended up consolidating (closing) the card instead. Great job Citi.

maddybeagle said:Could we stay on topic, please...After reading this thread....a couple more ideas....somebody mentioned that relocation between 0% cards might be allowed...I am going to try this in the coming week so that I can use a card on bt for purchases...and move some limit to another citi card also on bt...I mention this because you could simply relocate a month or so before an offer expires....If consolidation works that is fine, also, since many here have more cards than they really can use...I would just consolidate more recent accounts into new offers and work to keep a few of the older cards open for history...

I don't know about you, but my new cards tend to only be 10-20% the size of my older cards. So applying for three cards just to reallocate into one new card wouldn't help much. Besides if you apply for a bunch of extra cards the odds are they'll just split the lines between the three anyway which would defeat the purpose.

maddybeagle said:That wasnt what I was getting at...I was suggesting relocating to a new card before the 0% offer expires (one poster suggested that Citi might be allowing for relocation from one 0% offer to another)...Example...rec. a citibank card in Jan. of this year with a 12 month bt and use for BT for 11 months (and rec. another citibank card with another 0% offer or use one that you have "banked") and relocate to the new card before the BT offer expires on the first...

That still requires two cards in under 12 months to receive significant credit lines. What I'm getting at is without reallocation, ALL my 12 month or new Citi cards have credit lines of 20% or less my older cards. Plus I believe there is a 90 day limit for applying for new cards. Plus it takes 6 months for my credit to recover. Plus you can't ask for CLIs until the cards have aged for 6 months or more.

So if the card line was small 11 months ago, it is probably still small right now when it is time to reallocate.

Guess I just got a "no" too. Rep said the request was made and would be complete within 24 hours...but according to other reports here, that's a no go. Doh!

faztcobra said:faztcobra said:Guess I just got a "no" too. Rep said the request was made and would be complete within 24 hours...but according to other reports here, that's a no go. Doh!

Update to my post here. Also replied in the Citi Rention thread - http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?catid=52&threadid=525330&newest=1#last - I was able to get the Retention dept to re-allocate my line for me after I called customer service and was denied.

Thanks, faztcobra, after coming back from vacation today to see that my last try at reallocation had failed to go through(no big surprise there after talking to 5 different csr's last week and trying the reallocation with all of them and not one of them going through, even the last one where the csr said it should go through that time because I was reallocating only from my other 0% cards) I came on here to see if anyone had any updates and I read your post and sure enough I tried calling them again for the 6 or 7th time now, I lost count, anyway I told the csr about all the calls I had made last week and how none of them went through and told him about his own policy which I seemed to know more about than he did, and he seemed to recall some new changes in their policy and he went and read it.

He came back and said that they can't do any reallocations not only 0% cards with no fees for bt's like the at&t cards but also I couldn't do them for cards that had capped bt fees because he said I couldn't even reallocate to my card with a maximum fee of $75. He also said that I couldn't even consolidate cards to those cards either. So having tried pretty much everything I could think of other than threatening to cancel my cards to try to get retention, I came on here and read your post and saw you had luck with the retention in getting the reallocation, so I figured what the heck after that guy turned me down I thought well I will just ask the guy to transfer me to someone in retention, and so I asked and he said yeah I think I can do that and he said he will tell them the reason is because I want to close my card and I said ok.


So I start talking to the retention guy and told him what I wanted to do, how much I wanted to balance transfer and told him I would prefer to keep my other accounts open(I was reallocating from 3 cards into a 4th one the at&t card) and he said he should be able to get that done for me and he said it could be a couple days before it shows up maybe on Monday or so, after he said that I was skeptical since I wanted it to be instant this time. Anyway He said he was sure that this one would go through and then he also gave me a 2.99% for a year or something like that on my old dividend card, not that I really cared cause I pay my bill off completely every month anyway unless I have a 0% offer and I don't use that card anymore.


Anyway to make a long story even longer(but the ending is the most important part anyway) I checked about 30 minutes after I got off the phone with him and completely surprised to see that the reallocation had gone through and very fast as well. So just so everyone knows I had tried about everything to get a reallocation from citibank and this is the only method that will work from my experience.


Thanks again faztcobra for the good news on your success, I am not sure if I would have tried a retention reallocation if I hadn't read your post.

A success to report with Citi business reallocation. Moved $12K from Professional to a new CitiBusiness PremierPass card, leaving $2K on Professional. Moved $6500 from new CitiBusiness MC to the aforementioned PremierPass card, leaving $1K on CitiBusiness MC.

One phone call yesterday, reallocated CLs reflected online today.

jaydunning said:
Come to find out, all three BT's were approved, but the credit line for the AT&T card was shifted to Citi Prof while the AT&T BT was in process, so as it now stands, I have a $3,200 BT (pitiful, I know) on my AT&T card with only $1,100 credit limit. How this will shake out I have no idea. \\Citi does not charge your account for the BT until the check has been cashed. So if you haven't cashed it yet, I would sort out your credit limits first, then deposit the check.

I also was told no allocation to 0% cards about 2 weeks ago.

I was going from Citi Div (my oldest card) into ATT Universal (with a new 0%, no fee 12 month offer) and had been told it was in process 2 times. My third call they told me they do not reallocate to 0% cards.

I will probably try to re-allocate to another card that I plan to close later, then consolidate it into my 0% cards.