I got to spend a lot of quality time with Citibank CSRs regarding my pesky, paid-off $10k Citibiz PremierPass card (which was due for it's annual fee roughly... today). I wanted to try to reallocate the credit limit with my other, no-fee, Citibusiness card.

- Try 1: Speak to regular CSR, ask to reallocate, rep says "no", "cannot do reallocation business->business, only personal->business".
- Try 2: Ask to close card, transferred to retentions, rep says "no", and repeats the above reason, but adds "it might be possible if they were both the same type (i.e. platinum select). But does offer a 3.9% BT deal.
- Try 3: (I wait over weekend) Speak to regular (but perhaps stoned) CSR, ask to reallocate, she puts me on hold. Comes back and says "maybe", and puts me on hold again, and says "I can try". I reaquest to reallocate $9k. She says it may take a few days. I see it took effect at the end of the day.
- Try 4: Call to close card. Transferred to retentions again. Retention rep says "I see we've talked to you recently" (he may have been referring to previous deal I was given over a month ago to hang on, his feelings sounced hurt). I ask to just close the card to simplify my life, since I have another card. He volunteers "would you like me to consolidate the $1k credit limit?", I say "sure", and it takes effect in a day or two.

On the upside, I now have a $51k credit limit one one card with Citibank, it's by far my largest CL. On the downside, I got more exposed to the incredibly inconsistent CSRs of citibank.

- Oh, and this was the same card that I had overpaid by $720 on accident. I just got the refund check yesterday. Between lost mail and usual delays, it was five weeks since the original overpayment. Sheesh.

- I received my last "stuff" from my Discover Miles, a $5 gift card to go with my other $50 gift card.

- I received the 20k TYP from Citibank for the .Ultimate Savings Account promo.

- I also received a mailer for, and already spent the money to qualify for, the less exciting 1500 TYP debit card promo.

- I had signed up for the trial of Credit Check Total to start some power-bumpage, since I heard it could be used for multiple pulls in one day. But then they just changed the service so it was only one pull a day, so I canceled it.

- I disputed (by phone) three inquiries on Equifax that were fairly bogus. One was a duplicate inquiry from an app last year, and two were inquiries done while opening bank accounts where I wasn't applying for any loans. They were deleted from the credit report. So now I have 4 or so inquiries on EQ, and all are at least a year old.

- edit: I also got $25 and $10 bank bonuses from BofA and Citibank, respectively. I forget why, exactly.

August is basically done. While doing my planning, it was my intention that I would set August as the arbitary "ending" of my AOR. Even though I still have two credit cards carrying balances for a few more months, the amounts are pretty small. I'm much more focused on prepping for the next batch of activity.

However, last week I learned there's still time to bungle stuff!

Bungle

Here's what happend. I needed to pay off my Citibank business card. Aug 25 was the day the 0% expired. I used ex-MBNA billpay (which is basically CheckFree) to schedule a payment from my Countrywide Savingslink to Citibank. The problem? When processing large payments, sometimes CheckFree generates a check, rather than ACH transactions. Countrywide is a savings account, and cannot process checks. So I see the check clear off Countrywide one day, and then I see it reversed the following day. I call up and ask if there's any way they can not return the check back to Citibank, and they say there isn't. Citicards.com does not yet show any indication of them having my check returned, but it will happen, and there will probably be a fee, and of course, interest charges.

Not only that, but I still wanted to pay off the balance ASAP. I couldn't use the citicards website because, as far as they were concerned, my balance was "zero". I couldn't use billpay from the Countrywide account, because it would just generate another check. So I used Countrywide to "push" money to my Fidelity account (it was credited on friday), and then I'm using ex-MNBA billpay to pay the citibank line again next tuesday. But not only that, but billpay said it required an extra couple of days to do a large payment over $5k, so I had to "smurf" the payments into multiple smaller transactions.

I pity the poor CSR at Citibank who is going to have to figure this all out when I call next week to try to get my inevitable returned check fee waived.

Investment Results
I'm jumping the gun slightly, because dividends haven't yet been credited on two mutual funds, but I have a good expectation of what it will be. Here is the investment breakdown from the orama:

Investment returns:
FNBO Interest - $1041
SECU Interest - $7866
Countrywide Interest - $614
Fidelity Money Markets - $1525
Net taxable bond return - (-$9)
Net muni bond return - $110
Total: $11,147

Total fees:
$374 in transfer fees
$8 in annual fees
$43 in monthly finance charges

I was less aggressive with investments as I thought I might have been when I started this last summer. In hindsight, that was an excellent idea, since that was just about the beginning of the global credit implosion. Even boring bond-focused mutual funds didn't due too well. The municipal bonds had been down even, but have recovered somewhat in price so they eked out a small gain with dividends. However, the money would have performed better if I had just parked it in a high yield savings account. (I'm still holding the bonds for another few months so I can write off a loss on my taxes).

Theoretically, I still like the idea of using a portion of AOR money invested in volatile but fairly non-correlated asset classes (bonds, stocks, commodities, etc) to try to create a portfolio with fairly low volatility but higher returns than money markets. On a practical basis, this is very difficult when the time horizon of a portfolio is only one year.

Credit Profile
My creditworthiness is predictably looking better. The only remaining orama balance is US Bank, which is just over 50% utilization (and I'll be paying it down to under 50% util soon). I've only got three cards on my personal credit report reporting a balance (and I'll be getting that down to only two with prepayment of my daily spenders). I'm not subscribed to any of the scoring services at the moment, but creditkarma just revamped their scoring range to use the 300-850 range that FICO uses, and according to that I'm at 795. So that's a pretty promising sign, anyway.

A minor postscript:

I guess Citibank finished their "investigation" about my my returned check fee on my biz card, as the fee was reversed today. Took them about two weeks. But more interestingly, I also received my monthly statement during that time. So while my 0% period should have ended on 8/25, and even though I carried a balance through 8/30 (plus the $39 balance longer), I was charged no interest! So either the 0% promo rate was really goo through the end of the statement cycle (as many lenders do), or all of the postings and reversals to my account basically broke the calculation of finance charges. I just thought it was an interesting data point.