My Second App-O-Rama (06/19/07) - jairocon - In Progress

Well - just got a phone call from BofA about closing all of my accounts. Specifically, these are the activities that they weren't happy with:

- 116k debt shown on credit report (they do have the most up-to-date figure)
- 22 major accounts opened since 2006
- my accounts used for checkfree transactions (billpay)

I spoke to the credit specialist for over 10 minutes, and there was really nothing that I could do to change his mind.

I will be able to keep the payments going until the promotional periods expires.

At the point of closure these were my accounts with BofA:

1. BofA Biz opened 06/2007 - balance: 34,500 limit: 34,500 utilization 100%
2. BofA Worldpoints opened 06/2007 - balance: 33,642 limit: 37,800 utilization 89%
3. Fidelity Worldpoints opened 06/2007 - balance: 498 limit: 500 utilization 99%
4. BofA PowerRewards opened 05/2006 - balance: 0 limit: 500 utilization 0%
5. BofA NFL opened 06/2007 - balance: 0 limit: 500 utilization 0%
6. MBNA opened 2000 - balance: 3 limit: 500 utilization 1%

I didn't ask specifically whether the Business card would be closed but he mentioned 5 credit cards, so I will assume that yes even the business card will disappear.

I pleaded for him to at least keep my old MBNA card (est.2000) opened since it has such a small CL, he was not at all willing to do such a thing.

He said that they are able to re-open lines that were closed within the next 3 years, but it doesn't sound like that will happen.

Wow - I thought I was getting pretty good at protecting my lines but this one took me by a surprise. In any case - I'll have to take an extended look at my credit portfolio and perhaps consolidation and closure of some accounts wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Edit: Added one more BofA card - so I do actually have 6 cards, and the rep talked about 5 cards. This means that either BofA Biz or Fidelity might be spared.

Sorry to hear about the nasty response from BofA. Could you elaborate on the issue with Checkfree (billpay). Is this the old MBNA system where you can pay via a CC?

This turn of events really makes me nervous.

jairocon said: Well - just got a phone call from BofA about closing all of my accounts. Specifically, these are the activities that they weren't happy with:

- 116k debt shown on credit report (they do have the most up-to-date figure)
- 24 major accounts opened since 2006
- my accounts used for checkfree transactions (billpay)

I spoke to the credit specialist for over 10 minutes, and there was really nothing that I could do to change his mind.

I will be able to keep the payments going until the promotional periods expires.

At the point of closure these were my accounts with BofA:

1. BofA Biz opened 06/2007 - balance: 34,500 limit: 34,500 utilization 100%
2. BofA Worldpoints opened 06/2007 - balance: 33,642 limit: 37,800 utilization 89%
3. Fidelity Worldpoints opened 06/2007 - balance: 498 limit: 500 utilization 99%
4. BofA PowerRewards opened 05/2006 - balance: 0 limit: 500 utilization 0%
5. BofA NFL opened 06/2007 - balance: 0 limit: 500 utilization 0%
6. MBNA opened 2000 - balance: 3 limit: 500 utilization 1%

I didn't ask specifically whether the Business card would be closed but he mentioned 5 credit cards, so I will assume that yes even the business card will disappear.

I pleaded for him to at least keep my old MBNA card (est.2000) opened since it has such a small CL, he was not at all willing to do such a thing.

He said that they are able to re-open lines that were closed within the next 3 years, but it doesn't sound like that will happen.

Wow - I thought I was getting pretty good at protecting my lines but this one took me by a surprise. In any case - I'll have to take an extended look at my credit portfolio and perhaps consolidation and closure of some accounts wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Edit: Added one more BofA card - so I do actually have 6 cards, and the rep talked about 5 cards. This means that either BofA Biz or Fidelity might be spared.

Jairocon, sorry to hear it,

I'm not sure if you read my adverse action, but I had the same thing happen. They closed the Biz card a couple weeks after this. Note with me specifically I asked him to list out the last 4 of my (8) closed accounts so I could reconcile them. He mentioned one I didnt recognize (turned out they reissued one the day before the call for some reason and is why I didnt recognize it) and like a jackass I asked if that was a business card (I didnt know the account number of the biz card.) Not to provide false hope, but maybe this caused him to send a letter to the business department or something and is why my biz account was closed a couple weeks later due to personal lines adverse action. I'm confident (not that it matters at 100% utilization) it is your biz card that is open.

Like you I tried everything I could down to the hey can I just have 1 little card. It makes me wonder, what was the point of the call..... I offered full docs, I offered reasonable explanations, I used cards for purchases regularly, I dont think thats what they are calling to ask. Maybe if we said "hey I didnt apply for all that crap, thanks for bringing it to my attention --- I gotta look into this RIGHT AWAY" that would trigger a different line of questioning, but anything logical or intentional and they say cya......

I'm not sure "billpay is bad" is a valid conclusion to draw from the adverse actions against jairocon and kkerty.

Ironically, OP, if you had continued to run 30K+ month through your billpay card instead of reallocating to a new BT card, you might not have triggered the account review. You would have kept 30K of debt off your credit report. (Who knows, maybe 100K was the trigger?)

Yes, BofA should be smart enough to see their own billpay debt, but if the whole process begins with a review of FICO, then hiding balances is still a good thing.

to give you credit, the billpay versus BT choice wasn't clear cut. managing the monthly debits and credits on a billpay card is certainly more work than just making minimum payments on a BT card. plus, it's obvious BofA doesn't really like MBNA billpay, and they could certainly take it away any day. locking that money up in a BT eliminated that particular risk.

unfortunately, there were others.

Jairocon, sorry to hear about this BOA development and thanks for volunteering the detailed information. I think it is true for many around here (even DaveHanson is not safe) that should an issuer decide to look at one's credit report (i.e., go beyond just the credit score) while one is "in the process" the issuer is not going to like what it's going to see and may take adverse action (e.g., we know FNBO does another pull couple of weeks later so it's a standard procedure there). True that different issuers have different sensitivities to what's on one's credit report, but still it seems important not to give issuers an excuse to check your credit history while running an AOR. So, I'm wondering if you think you gave BOA a reason (other than general usage pattern with them) to look a bit closer at your current credit profile. May be you've applied for another (deposit) account with them? It sounds like they did pull your credit history to come up with all that info on you -- do you see a hard pull from them on your credit report dated shortly before they called?

cyberkost said: I'm wondering if you think you gave BOA a reason (other than general usage pattern with them) to look a bit closer at your current credit profile. May be you've applied for another (deposit) account with them? It sounds like they did pull your credit history to come up with all that info on you -- do you see a hard pull from them on your credit report dated shortly before they called?No, there was nothing unusual in my recent history with BofA. I haven't opened any new accts with them since the AOR and there is no hard pull by them. The only snafu was at the end of July when a payment of $1.6k was returned unpaid by FNBO to my BillPay MBNA card. However, I was on top of it right away, calling both BofA and FNBO trying to figure out who's at fault and in the end while none of the sides admitted any fault of their own, they both reversed any fees (BofA reversed theirs and FNBO offered to pay any fees related to an unpaid item). After my payment eventually posted successfully, I got a call back from an MBNA rep just to confirm that no damage was done to any of my cards and that it would be impossible to track who's at fault.

markkundinger said: Also jairocon, were you doing any "shenanigans" with MBNA billpay? Especially having BofA cards paying each other in a big way?I don't believe so. I've never paid another BofA card or a BofA account using billpay - not recently and not ever. Up until July, I have used to make large sum payments to an outside depository account, yet I've been doing that for months before and this was not sigled out during the phone call.

I personally can't pinpoint the adverse result on any one single thing - I do believe it was simply an outcome of all things added together.

Looking at my experian report this morning - all 5 of my personal cards show closed by grantor including the Fidelity card. There is no way for me to check the BofA Biz card's status.

RagingBull said: Even if you had a very high balance with BoFA, will the credit analyst even look at that for the consideration of your account? Also, Did you want you to pay all the balance back immediately for BofA?I did offer to pay off the balances to keep the accounts alive - it was a no go. He didn't talk too much about my BofA balances. He pointed out my non-BofA balances and the number of new accounts. I think I did as much as I could over the phone to prevent the closure of the accounts, that phone call lasted close to 15 minutes, but he wouldn't budge.

So far I got 5 letters in mail about closing my personal lines - nothing about the Biz line yet, so I'm still crossing my fingers that they're not going to touch that one.

There's really no way for me to see online that the accounts are closed - they are displayed in the exact same way as when they were open and the statements seem to print the same way. I wonder how quickly will the $0.00 lines disappear from BofA's online access. Whenever I decide to close a checking/savings account w/ BofA, it disappears from online access within days.

did you tell them yes?

Time to update:

- successfully received 25k AMEX MR points, now I need to decide what to do with them. I signed up for a new Southwest Rapid Rewards account (I had an old one that I've never used) and got the 8 bonus points (info). So now I only need to transfer 12,000 points to get a free roundtrip flight ticket. And I guess I could use the remaining 13k pts to get my Delta account close to 50k miles. Too bad AMEX MR doesn't support United.

- got my 10k starwood points as well a while ago - will use these for hotel rooms

Now about Starwood: It is a business account. AMEX re-allocated $24k from one of my personal lines to get it open. Now the personal sits at $1k CL. I'm a bit reluctant to move the $24k back to personal through reallocations, not to unleash the wrath of AMEX FR (I'm a bit uneasy since the BofA fiasco). I don't have any BTs with AMEX and all my AMEX lines are at $0, so perhaps I should.

- Requested $16k BT from my Suntrust card --> CitiBiz. That was on 9/16. They said they're mailing a check. My SunTrust was debited on 9/16, nothing is credited in CitiBiz yet. I've successfully BTed to CitiBiz back in July, so I don't know what the problem is. Will probably have to call Suntrust soon, as this is eating away from my 9 month 0% promo.

- Trying to get in on the SECU deal. I mailed my app on Saturday, hoping it will get accepted. However, also hoping that they take their time processing it, as the money to fund the CD is not yet available in my GMAC account. It's in there but it will take a while for it to become available. I wasn't ready for this deal since I was planning on milking FNBO until the very end when the SECU deal showed up and GMAC is not the best account to wire into. In retrospect - I should have moved it through my AmericanBank (4% APY) checking account, but I panicked Worst case scenario - the $200k check will bounce.

Things I should have done:
1. Move the National Parks Visa CL to BankAtlantic and then do a BT. I had to BT twice from National Parks, since they didn't do a large enough of a BT the first time, so in fact I paid them 2x$50 for the BT fees. That's before I knew that I could have popped it onto the BankAtlantic side. It's too late now probably - I'll investigate this week. If it's still possible, I will go for it.

2. I should try and get some CL from my CitiDividend onto CitiBiz. I'm not using the BT from CitiBiz just yet, saving it in case of any emergencies, but in the meantime, I should work the CSRs to at least get that CL increased.

Did I mention that I miss my MBNAbillpay? Oooooh. Sweet mbnabillpay. Now I actually have to setup payments manually with every card issuer. And it gets especially annoying when Wells Fargo doesn't let me pay from outside account. They run all these TV ads about how they want to make financial life easy on people - well they're not making it easy on me! Anyway, enough of complaining.

I haven't gottent any bonus deals lately - I feel like I should sign up for something.

Oh wait, I've gotten in on the Chase Bank deal (+$125) and SunTrust Bank deal (+$50) in August - but that was mostly to pay for some of my expenses during my Orlando vacation. My g/f was a bit freaked out when our first stop straight from the airport was a bank branch However, she's getting used to it and since I let her keep all the bonuses and interest from her AOR, which I manage, she's not complaining much anymore. The problem is, when she gets an occasional phone call from a creditor and then she's like "I have an account with which bank? Since when?"

Anyway, since the BofA "fiasco" I've had no other problems yet (knock on wood). I've gotten rid of most of the inquiries on my reports except 1 on Equifax and 10 on experian. I'm going to try and get rid of 2 inquiries from Experian (verizon wireless, bofa).

My TrueCredit scores at the moment are: TU 721 EX 684 EQ 724

swagatalakshmi said: Where are you parking your money ?

Thant is more important now a days ....Hopefully SECU, if it falls through then EverBank.

jackcrawfish said: jairocon said: swagatalakshmi said: Where are you parking your money ?

Thant is more important now a days ....Hopefully SECU, if it falls through then EverBank.Good choices. Will you park only the 12 month $$$ at secu (7 month cd)? Or will you park all of it, then transfer the 6 month promo debt terms to remaining available 12 month options?Parking most of the AOR money in SECU. If it goes through, I'm going to have to dip into my own savings to pay off the 6 month BTs, but the SECU deal was too good to pass up and too good to not max it all the way to $200k.

my condolences. freaking bastards.

kkerty89 said:
I'm not sure if you read my adverse action, but I had the same thing happen. They closed the Biz card a couple weeks after this.

sorry jairocon, you're letter is going to say ... for a reason .... something along the lines of ..

Closed due to adverse action on your personal credit with FIA.

What is really going to irritate you, beyond the obvious irritations, is you cant even make payments for the account online. you need to use some other billpay and will need to figure out your corp number (it's only on the statement) to get them to apply right. I get into the habit of shredding statements pretty quick with the crutch of online access. The first payment I had to send to my card number because I had no other options, it did get credited correctly, but I was sweating it being considered late and losing 0%.

kkerty89 said: you cant even make payments for the account online. you need to use some other billpay and will need to figure out your corp number (it's only on the statement) to get them to apply rightThanks for the remainder kkerty89! I told them to mail me the last statement as well, so I should hopefully get it in time for my due date (10/15). She also noted my account so that I can make a phone payment without getting charged the phone payment fees, since the online option went away. Then again knowing BofA Biz, they're going to screw it up anyway. Might as well get the corp number and schedule a billpay from fidelity or usaa.

jairocon said: - Requested $16k BT from my Suntrust card --> CitiBiz. That was on 9/16. They said they're mailing a check. My SunTrust was debited on 9/16, nothing is credited in CitiBiz yet. I've successfully BTed to CitiBiz back in July, so I don't know what the problem is. Will probably have to call Suntrust soon, as this is eating away from my 9 month 0% promo.I called SunTrust yesterday - they told me not to worry that it takes 2-4 weeks. Ballocks! Not surprisingly I got a phone call from SunTrust today. Their BT check was returned to them and get this: It said please change the payee name to FIA Card Services and mail it to Willmington, DE!!!

Now why would CITI return a check mailed to CITI processing center with CITI account on it and tell them to send the payment to BofA? That escapes my understanding. Then again some of the older SunTrust cards are handled by FIA (not mine though)... so I think that SunTrust just royally screwed up my BT.

Anyway, SunTrust CSR conferenced me to a Citi CSR, who confirmed that the payment address I listed was correct. So now SunTrust will try to overnight the check (to a new address for overnight Citi payment processing center).

All I know is that a BT requested on 9/16 has been floating out there, while it should be in my savings account! And of course SunTrust debited my account right on the 9/16! They wouldn't reset the date (to get me extra time on my 9mo deal), b/c they'd have to stop payment on the check (which has not been cashed yet - how stupid - just shred it) and they'd have to recode my account (too much work I guess).

Why couldn't they just send an electronic payment I don't understand.

Damn it - so my girlfriend's AOR 1 year anniversary is today. Yesterday I called to cancel her AMEX Gold and AMEX Starwood card. In order to preserve history - I asked AMEX to convert her starwood into AMEX blue cash card. And the motherf#$%ers pulled a hard one on her experian. Shit! I'm cleaning up her reports doing the old bump-n-grind dance and these bastards have the audacity to pull a hard one?

Now the question is whether they just cancelled her old starwood and opened a brand new AMEX blue cash w/o conversion - as in a brand new account. Bastards! This really pissed me off right of the bat this morning.

Oh AMEX is going to get such a nasty call from me in a few hours - I have no idea how I'm going to get them to reverse the hard one on experian - but what pisses me even more, is that it was me on the phone with them last night - and being the "AOR veteran" that I thought I was - I was pretty happy with the way everything went. Then I find this.

---

In other news - my Suntrust BT finally did show up at CitiBiz. I tried BT-ing directly into one of my many (20+) bank accounts directly from CitiBiz, only to get an error every single time. So the most likely scenario is going to be a BT -> PenFed CC, while at the same time doing a cash advance from a PenFed CC. Oh how I miss my old MBNA billpay...

Just another example of how you can't trust ANY of these BASTARDS.

I will freeze EXP for my AOR, Afterward I will freeze TU and EQ (online at TC and Equifax now).

So whenever I talk to any of these bastards they CAN'T pull a hard!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jericon, Had the reports been frozen, they couldn't lie to you and say, "OHH it won't be a hard pull".

PROBLEM SOLVED

Also request CLI as often as you like with the long form, CAUSE THEY CAN'T PULL A HARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I NOW HAVE CONTROL OF MY CREDIT REPORT (f@&%*IN LIERS)

EugeneV said: win333:
1. Current lenders can still pull your reports even if you freeze them.
2. It takes about 3 days to get the freeze lifted, permanently or temporarily, for residents of most states (PITA)
3. It is not free in most states.

So, nothing to get so excited about. And definitely wrong place.

Sorry, I know current lenders can still get report. BUT they can't put a new INQ on the report, ONLY SOFT.
I can already lock EQ and TU online with the click of a button and off again (it says so on the website) EXPERIAN will be soon to follow.

jairocon

The question is - how are closed lines that are carrying a balance considered. While a $0 balance closed line does no longer contribute its CL to an overall CL scoring/utilization, would a $33k balance closed line (w/ $37.5k original CL) be classified as 100% util or a <89% util? I have not seen a score drop since the closures hit the CRs.

What I would do is pay the closed line off 1st(when your ready)dispute the balance and watch your score.

It seems to me (FICO), is a 6 year olds toy program, example:

IF Balance =>90% then do this -30 else score = same (there may not be a score drop for multipe cards over 90%)

(Bizcreditnow) on credit boards Said, he has 131 INQ and his score is still over 700

If INQ =1 THEN score =-2 ELSE INQ =2 THEN score=-4 ELSE INQ=6 THEN score=-12 ELSE INQ=131 THEN score =-20 (you get the idea)

It seems to me that, once you've lost XXX number of points FICO won't drop your score any more for the same VIOLATION.

I have a 46,000 CL and 7,000 WAMU CL, when my WAMU card was at over 90% 6,700 of 7,000, I still got the message
ITEMS HURTING YOUR SCORE = HIGH BALANCE(S)
So if I run up my 200.00 BofA card I think i'll have the same problem, soon as I paid of the WAMU card the (high balance message went away) what a supid model!!!!

Any thoughts or different experiences

PS BIZCREDITNOW did an AOR starting with a total of 115 INQ (he doesn't understand) and is still getting a few small approvals, nothing big but who would have thought you could get ANY APPROVALS. (I'm trying to make sure he's not including soft) I will report when more info is available.

(EDIT) OMG those are all hard INQ
http://creditboards.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=291548&st=125&#entry2684041