markkundinger said:Your credit score is fairly low. Why? Are there any negatives on your report? How long have you had the credit cards or home loans? A score like that is borderline for an AOR.

Note that Citibank has two "i"s in it.

You probably should have gotten the CitiProfessional Thankyounetwork card. Then you could have gotten 15K TY points to redeem for cool stuff.

You can get balance transfer checks from both Citibank and Discover. With Citibank it's easy, request them online. With Discover, you might have to call and ask for them, you do NOT want "cash advance checks" because you get charged hella fees.

Also, I'm not aware of any hot deals of BofA Worldpoints cards... was there a transfer fee? How much? Do you have a link?

Finally, one think I did well was scattering your apps among a bunch of different lenders. It can be useful when trying to build on on a "thin" portfolio of credit.

Thanks for your analysis. Yes, my credit is history is only 7 years old, was not in the US before then. And yes, I do have a negative of a medical bill that I settled 2 years ago, but its obviously still affecting my scores. My credit cards are about 4-7 years old. The BOA Worldpoint mastercard has no balance transfer fee and 0% APR for 12 months. I had received an invitation through the mail and I called them so I do not have a link. I did confirm that the terms were true on the phone. I am hoping after I get all these balances cleared, I should be able to have higher credit scores. When I requested for a BT from discover on the phone, they told me they do not send a cheque on the mail anymore. They said I have to give them an account number where I want the money deposited, oh, they did point out that they do not deposit to a checking or savings account. LOL

A couple of questions:
1. Should I BT Discover to my home equity loan and try and pay that off within the year, or I should I just keep making the minimum payments?
2. Should I call Citi before requesting a BT online to request a CL increase?

Credit repair strategies might be attempted against the old medical bill to improve your credit report. I don't know anything about those. Creditboards.com typically has more resources.

That's a pretty good targeted BofA offer. You might want to put "(targeted)" in your description in the OP, that's the usual procedure.

Depending on the rules of the app, I would have waited on doing the BT from BofA, to see if I received other cards, then I could consolidate the balance into one gigantic BofA card, and do one big BT.

However, if the BofA card lets you do more transfers, also with no fee, then it's an extremely useful card. You can do transfers from Discover to it, pay it down, then request another BT into your bank account.

There are other ways to turn a balance transfer into cash (a HELOC can be a good one). Here's a recent thread:
here

- It never hurts to ask for CLIs, but in my experience, they usually don't help much on new cards, at least not with citibank.

So is it not a good idea to pay off my outstanding Etrade home equity loan that I already have a balance on?

If you currently have a closed-end home equity loan, that you cannot easily do advances on, then I do not recommend putting your BT money into it. It won't be liquid, and it will be hard to repay the cards.

Also, I would not open a HELOC for the sole purpose of doing AORs. It's not worth the paperwork (plus, it would be a third loan against your house).

Bear in mind that you probably won't make $5k in interest profits over the course of the AOR, so if you use your entire Discover balance to BT to your HE loan, then you're still going to have to use some personal funds at some point to pay it off.

Credit repair strategies might be attempted against the old medical bill to improve your credit report.
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I searched through that website and it seems I had a chance of getting that negative cleared by contacting the hospital before settling the debt through "Hippa". Seems like its a little too late now.

MoneyPiggy said:sushii said:You probably should have gotten the CitiProfessional Thankyounetwork card. Then you could have gotten 15K TY points to redeem for cool stuff.
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I just went to Citi's website and only saw 10k TY points by signing up CitiProfressional . Am i missing something here ? Thanks first
Turn Pop-up blocker off. When you close app page a window will pop-up with 15k offer.

reedie said:but doing a balance transfer means you pay 4% finance charge, doesn't it?

Then its so NOT hot!

UPDATE!
I got BOA to increase my credit to 20K and transferred to my checking account. There is a 3% on BT but the money is free for a 15 months. Then Discover card this morning agreed to move my 15K from my old card to my new card with 5k so I can have a CL of 20k. But they want to close the old card which I've used for years. I told them I will think about it. Is this a good idea or not?

I just looked at my home equity loan account with Etrade and I have a fixed interest rate of 7.5% with a balance of 43k. That means I am paying an average of $9.05 a day on interest. Holy crap! I have had this loan for 3 years and have never paid attention to it, happily made my mininum payment without ever thinking of paying it off. Talk about ignorance I am paying half of this loan with BT money and save on the interest. Hell, I am even tempted to pay it off. What do you all think?