Pangloss1980's modestly aggressive 7/07 AOR

My AOR approach: I'm unlikely to need my credit rating for several years for any purpose other than the BT game; however, I may want to play it a few times, so I'm trying to maximize my immediate BT returns while still not scaring any issuers into CL cuts (even, if possible, please them into some unrequested CL increases) to make my next BT game all the more profitable. So I'm taking a middle route: <50% overall utilization, but on some cards I am starting with 80-86% individual utilization. If I end up understanding the idea a bit better, I may even try to increase my true utilization while maintaining my reported utilization low by using rolling on my BoA card.

My basic info, as related to CC companies:
HHI: 200k+ (claim parent's address as my own)
Personal income: 25+ (grad student) [A few asked for this in particular]
FICO at beginning: 791 (Experian, I think.)
Existing Credit: 13K on one 10 y/o Chase card
Previous Debt: $500 on Chase card; no loans of any variety out.

Cards applied for:

6 Month BT offer:
BAC Visa Platinum Plus (Delayed approval: 12.7k)
BAC Money Return (Delayed approval: 5k)
American Express IN:NYC (Instant approval: 13k)
Am Ex IN:CHI (Delayed approval: 13k)

12 Months BT offer:
Discover Miles (Delayed approval: 8k)
Chase Plat Visa (Delayed approval: 8.5k)
Chase Plat MC (Delayed rejection: Too many applications [Transunion])
GM Flex Earnings HSBC (Instant approval: .7k. CL increase denied - insufficient length with card)
Mastercard Cash or Fly Rewards HSBC (Delayed approval: 2.5k)
Citi® Driver's Edge® Options Platinum Select® MasterCard® (Delayed approval: 4.2k)
Citi® Home Rebate Platinum Select®Card * (Instant approval: 3.6k)
AT&T Universal Platinum Card (Citi) (Denied: # of credit requests within last 60 days)

Line increase cards:
American DreamCard HSBC (Delayed approval: 5.5k)
Overstock Rewards Card Chase (Delayed approval: 3.5k)
AMEX Blue Cash Am Ex (Delayed approval: 13k)

(Total new credit: $93.2k. Not sure if I'm supposed to be disappointed, I'm certainly not thrilled, but that is an increase from my previous 13k.)

I more or less ignored sign-up bonuses - not quite worth the trouble for me at this point, I think.

Disappointed at the CL and the one rejection from Citi, but a CLI requires a hard pull (says the CSR), so aside from my failed attempt at a CLI from HSBC (referred to hereafter as "Total Tool Bank Corporation," or TTBC) what I was offered was what I have.

Major lessons learned to date:

The AOR cost my 31 points on my FICO before I'd transferred a dime - that is, the 14 inquiries or so cost about 2 points a piece. Not the end of the world.

I love BoA - they transferred my money to my checking with a phone call, the whole thing took about a day, it was awesome. (I accidently combined my BoA cards though - thought that was the only thing they did, but I really wish I'd left one open with a 1k CL.)

I hadn't read the FWF thread closely enough on ideas for getting around those who won't transfer to checking, or who are slow to: after reall I had a 20k Chase card, which I then tried to BT 17K to my debit card number from Wells Fargo. Big mistake - after 8 days Wells Fargo still had no idea what was going on (couldn't even find the check), so I called Chase and owned up to having attempted to BT to a debit card, tried to lay it on a different Chase CSR. Chase apologized, said let's cancel that check for you, and that should clear up in a week; then just write yourself a check on the card.

At this point I'm underutilized because one of my Citi checks hasn't gone through yet and my Chase BT has been held up by my incompetence, and I haven't hit a statement date yet on my other cards so my FICO hasn't been hit yet. In two weeks I hope to have $45k in BT money in my EmigrantDirect (or SalemFive, which I just opened) account; a little bit after that and I plan to pay off my BoA with my AMEX lines, which at this point are just sitting around decreaseing my overall utilization. (The 39K in AMEX cards is letting me go nuts on my other cards, which is very nice.) After that I may attempt rolling with my 17.7k BoA card, especially if someone helps me out and confirms it's a productive idea. I'll be paying 1.5-2 times the minimum payment on my cards, and ready if Chase comes calling asking "Why the hell do you have so much money out" - if they want me to pay them or others down a bit I probably will because I want to protect the lines I have now and preserve any chance of improving them by paying them down more than the minimum required.

I'm interested in what people think I should do with HSBC - At this point should we be advising people to ignored them completely for AORs? They wouldn't reall because my cards were of different "types," - a GM card, a Cash or Fly, etc. - but so right now the only thing those cards do is (modestly, because of their ridiculously low CLs) is decrease my overall utilization. Would you guys recommend that I start using, say, the Cash or Fly card as my primary purchase card, in the hopes of increasing the CL on it, which would be good if I could find an HSBC card that I could roll that limit onto for a future AOR? Or should I just use my now low-CL Chase cards and pay them off (I don't charge too much and am always able to pay in full, even ignoring my $50k in BT money) so that Chase increases the limit on them, again setting me up for a realloc to a good BT card when time for the next AOR rolls around?

Thoughts and tips are welcome and appreciated.

ho hum. Anyone else tired of reading these over and over?

Pakaderm said: Do we have to say this in every single new AOR thread?

Yes, perhaps as more and more get tired of reading these, it may push FW to create a new group, or ban it. There's little to no value in these other than covertly soliciting information by those too lazy to read the plethora of other similiar posts...

My advice at his point is to do some more research on the AOR. Every time you think you are ready, you find something new out that would have made the AOR much more purposeful.

The first problem I see is no business cards. Not that you have to get them, but they can add a significant amount of BT money to your AOR with some of the best promos and best rewards. Read here

You have good HHI and you could pull off a stellar AOR. Don't regret it 3 months later that your AOR was only "mildly agressive" (but I respect your right to do what you feel comfortable with, I'm a grad student also and understand you hvae a lot else on your mind) Good luck.

I totally screwed the pooch by passing on the biz cards, I think when I sat down to apply I had just read some discouraging words about the practice and so passed, but I would do it differently now if I could. (Actually, can I? My FICO is still 757, but I have tons of new credit out there - that will kill any biz apps, right?) I actually did quite a lot of reading here on FWF before I started - the problem is that the info isn't centralized and presented as a consensus for a large portion of the important data. I was thinking of trying to remedy that myself, actually, but things are starting to get a bet busy.

oops, repost - delete for now until I have something else to say

Edit: Ok, so I'll slip this in, since you mentioned the difficulty of finding info, which is often true, especially if you don't know what you are looking for. Here is the ways I actually got the BT money from the credit cards to my checking: link to how to get the BT $ to checking

Thanks very much for the comments Mike and Mark.

One thing that confused me with all the "You've got to do business cards" talk was that I don't have anything - literally anything - that I could report as a business. I don't sell stuff on E-Bay. I gamble and make a bit every year, and I invest and make some more, but that's the only thing outside of my grad student fellowship and some smaller earning from public schools work. Citi's app, the one everyone says to go to first, seems to ask a lot of questions that don't make me look too promising, esp since I have to report my own and not HHI. I also didn't do anything with biz cards because my friends were thinking of starting up a legit business and I figured "Maybe I'll just use them in 12 months once they've established themselves a bit" (they're down with that). At this point my cards are all known to the credit bureaus, though my balances aren't - should I still be thinking of doing something with biz cards at this point, or will that just have to have been an expensive lesson for next time?

Very good point Mark about the bonus cards being relatively more productive for 1st timers for the AOR game; I screwed the pooch there too it would seem, I just was getting a little nervous getting past 15 cards (didn't want to get rejected for some large balance highly selective BT card just because I signed up for some piece of garbage for the $50 Best Buy gift certificate). I have no idea how Sony didn't make the list, it was supposed to.

I need to do some more reading about AMEX and Chase reviews - I talked to multiple Chase CSRs who said "Sure, you can BT 85% on our card, no problem" but maybe I'll take another look. The fact that those two are, from what I hear, the most attentive to overall utilization AND my issuers with the biggest lines helped me decide to stay under 50% overall, but I guess I just felt like experimenting with some over 50% individual utilization.

Also, about my relatively low CLs given my HHI: I agree, it is strange, and it makes me think that the fact that I reported it as my primary address for my whole life for most cards, and didn't report owning or renting, could have (entirely appropriately) gotten taken into account. My income is $30k, and that's my official address but not where I lay my head too often, but I think the CC issuers understand that I should be treated as a young adult reporting his parents' address and HHI, not someone pulling down 200k+ by himself or with his spouse. (I actually underreported HHI just so it wouldn't seem unbelievable, but if you combine my earnings with my parents' actual earnings it would get a fair bit higher.)

Wow, so what did you put for business revenue and how long the "business" (presumably just your name?) had been in business?
And are the biz inquiries going to ding my report? (Suppose not that much of a concern, but still...)

I'm probably late to the party here, but would have suggested the Chase Sony card...12 months at 0%, $75 cap, and a $100 credit after first purchase (included this in my wife-o-rama last month and got the hundy within about a week of the purchase). I know you said you weren't going for bonuses, but it would have been a wash with the "plain" Chase platinum Visa or MC. Also, as others have said, business apps would have been helpful (Advanta and Bank Atlantic both offer capped BT fees and 15 months at 0%).

As for psubill78, the comments to this (and most other AOR threads) suggest that there's at least a core group of FWF folks who aren't tired of these threads. There's a lot to be learned from AOR to AOR, especially with the changing dynamics of promotional offers. You may be onto something though - could be beneficial to create a sub-forum of FWF dedicated to the AOR threads. That way there's a central repository and those who want to share (and are interested in reading) don't have to deal with thread crapping from those who don't want to read the posts, but click anyway.

I wouldn't worry too much about daily quirks in your credit report over the very short term (within one month). If you start advancing on cards, your scores are going to be following a fairly predictable downward pattern.

The odds that on any one day an issuer is going to pull a credit report, and that that one credit line is going to report in such a way as that it will cause a lender to freak out (any more than they already would), is vanishingly small.

Or, to put it another way, if this is causing substantial worry to you, then you shouldn't be advancing on the AOR cards in the first place.

Oh, there might very well be an early warning system. There was some moderately convincing evidence over at creditboards that any time someone had a hard pull from Experian, AMEX followed up the next day with an account review soft pull.

Haven't heard of utilization-triggered A/Rs. But even if there were, nothing you can really do about it.