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Pron on VHS posted:How big of a hit is it to my credit score if I cancel a credit card after 1 year? I had the Chase Sapphire Preferred and realized I don't travel as much as I thought I do, and while I did enjoy the big signup bonus I don't want to pay the annual fee next year. It also makes up 50% of my available credit. Not much. You shouldn't worry about it unless you're planning to take out a large loan in the near future, and need to game your credit score. If you don't plan on taking out a mortgage, auto loan, or something along those lines soon, then just pay off your balance in full every month, don't go batshit insane opening and closing every credit card offer that comes in your junk mail, and your credit score will take care of itself. If you are concerned, though, you can always call up Chase and let them know that you like the card, but the annual fee is forcing you to cancel. Chances are pretty good that they'll be able to switch you to the non-preferred version, or even waive the annual fee for another year (which means you'll need to do the same dance again in twelve months, but hey, it's a few minutes on the phone and you get better rewards for a whole year).
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Nov 15, 2014 05:16
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Revitalized posted:I just got my first credit card from my bank today. I have a 0% APR for 6 months. A friend of mine told me that he built credit by paying 90% of his monthly balance and letting a bit of it carry over, then right before his 0% intro offer expired, he paid the entire thing off. No. You're not the exception, because there are no exceptions. Yes, the credit card company would like you to carry a balance, so they can squeeze as much money as possible from you. But, "balance carried" isn't tracked on your credit report, and it's not used to calculate credit scores. All the credit agencies see about your credit card balance is the bottom-line number on the statement. It doesn't matter if you paid the whole thing off thirty seconds after the last statement went out and then racked up that amount in new charges this cycle, or only made the minimum payment last time and carried every cent you could. Never carry a balance, and never take a cash advance. Not even once.
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Nov 16, 2014 12:24
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SpelledBackwards posted:It seems too easy to game then that it really surprises me if they don't split it out. My Chase Freedom did 5% Amazon in Q4 last year and is doing grocery stores now, so that's an opportunity to stock up (up to $1500 quarterly max spending) vs. my 3% Amazon Visa. You can game them for $75 in a quarter, and they get some of that back with merchant fees. ~$25 a month is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what they make charging interest to folks who carry a balance. Also, if you do find something that looks like a way to bust the system wide open, retailers will cut you off from gift card purchases when you buy a lot of them. Screwing around with near-cash products on a scale that's worth a bank's notice looks a lot like money laundering.
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Jan 3, 2015 08:19
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Bragon posted:Is it super duper bad for your credit rating to run a 0 balance on a card you aren't using? I got a Freedom last year but hardly used it, since my amex BCP and Sapphire Preferred do everything I need them to. If it is, should I close it or just make 1 purchase a month on it or something? Not at all - it's slightly better to keep an unused card open, to help your utilization. If you're still trying to establish credit, it's slightly better to have a "paid on time" note for each month than nothing, but that effect is close to microscopic if you've got other cards you're paying regularly.
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Jan 4, 2015 21:28
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Mr.AARP posted:I have a question about whether to open up a new college card. I tried applying for the Double Cash card but was declined right off the bat since I only work part time during school. Why not just get the Discover and carry both cards?
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Jan 19, 2015 07:41
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abagofcheetos posted:To anyone: Should you really try and get as much possible credit available to you as possible? It seems kind of counter-intuitive that your credit rating would go up the more possible credit you have to use, but it seems that is correct? If one of your credit cards offers you a no inquiry limit increase, I guess you should always take them up on the offer? Yes, unless you can't hold yourself back from spending more now that you've got a higher limit. To a lender deciding whether to extend credit, high limits elsewhere mean that other people have decided to trust you, and low utilization means that you're not over-extending yourself. The whole idea of a credit score is to measure the risk of someone not being able to pay back their loan, and those are both good signs.
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Feb 23, 2015 15:35
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Blinkman987 posted:Sad. Small Business Saturday was designed to accomplish two goals: make people feel virtuous for buying things with their credit card, and unleash a bunch of discount-seeking Amex cardholders on Visa-and-Mastercard-only small businesses over the course of a single day. Statement credits only help with the second, which is rapidly becoming moot thanks to Square and similar payment processors that hide higher Amex fees behind a flat charge. The whole "get over your Black Friday guilt by spending even more" thing was always an advertising push anyway. What, you thought they did it out of the goodness of their hearts?
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Oct 29, 2015 06:01
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Luigi Thirty posted:I do a lot of commuting and want to squeeze the most cash back I can out of my gas purchases. My Discover card is one of those ones with the revolving cash back categories so I only get 5% back on gas for three months out of the year, it's 0.25% otherwise. What should I be looking at for a credit card? I don't have a balance to transfer and I'm not interested in churning. Do you drive near a Costco location with gas? The new Costco Visa will come with a permanent 4% cash back on gas, including at Costco stations, which usually don't qualify as gas stations for rewards. Annual fee will be a Costco membership ($55). If you're paying for your own gas, it's likely the best option, because Costco tends to be quite a bit cheaper than other gas stations. If you're working with an expense account, an evergreen 4% is still a pretty sweet deal.
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Apr 18, 2016 15:11
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themaninblack posted:What is the opinion on the Ally CashBack Visa? - https://www.ally.com/bank/cash-back-credit-card/ It's not bad, but it's nothing special, and you can do better. The Ally card gives 1.1% generally and 2.2% on gas and groceries. The Double Cash is a straight 2% (assuming you pay the balance in full every month - if you ever carry a balance, of course, don't get a rewards card). Unless almost all your spending is on gas and groceries, the Double Cash is a better deal. If you're looking for specific rewards on gas and grocery spending, the Amex Blue Cash Everyday is 3% on groceries, 2% on gas, and 1% on everything else. You can also look at the Blue Cash Preferred if you do more than about $250/month on groceries (the increased rewards make up for the annual fee) or the Costco Visa if you shop a lot at and get your gas at Costco.
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Nov 5, 2016 01:56
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:I don't do a lot of travel spending but our family pretty consistently spends $250 on gasoline and $500 a month on groceries (unfortunately some of this is at CostCo because) The Citi Costco card is a really good deal, especially the ongoing 4% back on already-cheap Costco gas (which doesn't count as "gas" for most rewards programs, because of how warehouse discount stores are coded). I'd get the Costco card (for gas and Costco groceries) and the Blue Cash Everyday (for non-Costco groceries) unless you're sure that you'll be putting more than $3,200 of grocery spending on the Amex. Remember, you don't just need to beat breakeven on the annual fee; you also need to beat where you'd be with 3% rewards and no annual fee.
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Dec 2, 2016 22:57
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Saint Fu posted:Sure thing. The $95/yr is worth it for the 6% if you spend $2,375 on groceries (assuming the other option would be a no annual fee 2% cash back card). The breakeven number for grocery spending is about $3,200/yr - the Amex Blue Cash Everyday gives 3% back on groceries with no annual fee.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:19
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Vox Nihili posted:Wouldn't be surprised if they don't overnight any longer, they're frantically trying to cut down on the related costs now. Mine was overnighted a few days ago. That was annoying - USPS has a key to my building, but UPS tends to just leave packages in the bushes, and by the time they gave me tracking info it was too late to redirect to a UPS store. My guess is another production bottleneck on the metal cards.
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Jan 10, 2017 17:56
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dexter6 posted:I have had the Citi Dividend World Elite MasterCard for 14 years (it was my first credit card). Almost none. The average age of accounts includes closed accounts, so it'll stop increasing, but it won't drop off for a few years. If it has a significant limit, utilization will go up, but if you're running reasonable non-maxed-out-balances everywhere else then the increase won't be significant. (obligatory reminder: unless you're going to be buying a house or car in the very near future, or churning signup bonuses, you don't need to worry about gaming your credit score. A few years of good history across a couple of credit cards, low utilization, and no significant red flags, is almost always enough to hit the "excellent credit" cutoff in the mid-700 FICO range)
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Jan 31, 2017 15:45
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potatoducks posted:If your alternative is a straight 2% card like the double cash, then break even in $7500 on groceries. The no-AF Blue Cash is 3% back on groceries up to a cap of $6k (1% after the cap). For grocery-coded spending, it's strictly better than the Double Cash, starting from $0. The $95 AF Blue Cash Preferred is 6% back on groceries up to the same cap. The relevant comparison is between the two Blue Cash cards. Breakeven is $3,200 for going with the Preferred over the non-preferred version. At $2,375 the Preferred would start to beat the Double Cash, but the non-preferred Blue Cash would still be a better choice. In theory, the cap would give you another breakeven point where the Double Cash would pull ahead of the Preferred - but that's at $30,000. If you're spending $2,500 a month at the grocery store, you can probably find more savings there than you would get from min/maxing your credit card. (the real answer, of course, is to just pick up as many signup bonuses as possible; they offer a better ROI than you could ever hope to get from an ongoing rewards program)
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Mar 29, 2017 06:39
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Thoogsby posted:Question: What reason could there be for my FICO score to be significantly different than the TransUnion / Equifax scores on sites like creditkarma? I'm about ~100 points higher on creditkarma. Credit Karma uses a different scoring algorithm. Fun fact: there are literally dozens of ways to turn your credit report into a number. The one they use, VantageScore 3, will show significant differences from FICO on thin files and recently established credit (Vantage is more forgiving to people who have a short but good history) and paid-off collections (once something is marked paid in full, it has minimal impact under Vantage; FICO still cares a lot that it went to collections at all).
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Apr 28, 2017 15:15
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baquerd posted:Yeah, that's always been the biggest no-no for me on chip and pin - you lose all of the protections when your pin is compromised. Unless that's an urban legend? There were some horror stories out of the UK, where bank customers are typically liable for negligence leading to fraud. Banks would refuse to refund fraudulent transactions: they'd claim that the chip-and-PIN system was so perfectly secure, the only way that a criminal could possibly use the card would be through the cardholder's negligently disclosing the PIN, so the cardholder must be liable. But, that's in the UK. Cardholders have somewhat better rights under US law, and there was never an explicit liability shift anywhere. Just banks being the biggest jerks they possibly can under their terms of service.
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Oct 21, 2017 17:22
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ixo posted:I opened a CSR last year with an active CSP and it wasn't an issue. Got the 100k points promotion back when they were still doing that, closed the CSP and they rolled that limit into the limit for the CSR. I went into a Chase branch to apply, not sure if that makes a difference. Bolded the important part. They changed the policies in mid-2017 to say you can't have more than one open Sapphire product at the same time, and you can only get one Sapphire signup bonus every 24 months.
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Dec 26, 2017 21:23
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ilkhan posted:I now a no-fee CC available option to pay my rent. What are the best options for signup bonuses? I should be easily be able to meet any not-insane spend requirements. Score up mid-upper 700s, and I already have a CSP (opened 4/2015 iirc). I see above discussion about changing it to a freedom card and grabbing a CSR, but that also has a $450 fee attached to it. Dunno if I travel enough to use the whole bonus amount, though the TSA thing would be nice for the rare occasion when I do. There aren't a ton of great offers out there right now, especially if you're not looking for a travel-specific card. It seems like the best offers tend to come out around the holidays. You might want to look at the BoA Premium Rewards card, though; it's new enough they're still dangling a decent carrot: https://www.bankofamerica.com/credit-cards/products/premium-rewards-credit-card/ 50k points (essentially $500), $95 annual fee, $3k minimum spend, and they do reimburse precheck/global entry. The earn rate isn't fantastic, but hey, it's a decent signup bonus and BoA should let you downgrade. I'd stay away from the CSR. Without the giant signup bonus, it only makes sense if you are either pumping lots and lots of travel and restaurant expenses through the card, or have a bunch of ultimate rewards points that you want to burn for travel through the Chase portal at the CSR rate. If you can't say that you will absolutely spend $300 on travel every single year, you probably don't want it.
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Jan 13, 2018 23:57
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baquerd posted:Even considering the time value of money, if you're planning any travelling even within the next decade (and the rewards don't lose value), it can be more valuable to use them this way because you can easily double your 1:1 cash value that way. This usually only works out if you value high-end amenities at close to their cash value, and are willing to either pay a significant chunk of that cash value on upgradeable bookings or spend huge point balances to book the high-end stuff outright. In other words, points booking doesn't do much better than cash for most economy flights and midrange hotels. That's why Chase's travel portal is often a pretty good deal. The big value numbers for point redemption tend to come from something like, "I spent just $500 worth of points to upgrade my $3,500 transpacific business class ticket to a $7,500 first class seat! That means I got eight times the cash value, what an amazing deal." If you really want occasional insane-luxury splurges that make your Instagram followers jealous, maybe that's worth it. But it's a niche hobby when a lot of people would rather take an economy seat and a pile of cash.
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May 19, 2018 02:46
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I've never had an issue with international merchant misclassification. Visa, MasterCard, and so on are all global networks, and a merchant who takes cards will be set up with a local payment processor who knows what they do. The real problem with rewards for dining and incidentals while traveling is that a lot of countries aren't as card-friendly as the US. In semi-developed parts of the world, cash is still king, and mobile payments (think Venmo but for flip phones too) are a rapidly growing second place. Credit cards often aren't common outside places that cater to tourists. Even in Europe, cash-only small businesses are way more common than they are in the US. On that note, if you're going to do a lot of international travel, be sure to get a Schwab investor checking account before you leave. The interest rate isn't spectacular, and you have to sign up for a (free) brokerage account that will probably never do anything for you, but here's a line item from my statement last month: pre:05/31/2018 ATMREBATE ATM Fee Rebate $104.71
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Jun 29, 2018 02:11
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ETB posted:But really it's $30/year if you consider the credits? The return for restaurant and grocery spending is pretty impressive. Not all credits are created equal. With the CSR, if you do any traveling, you can consider the credit taken care of. Amex's credits are specific and kinda lovely. The airline fee credit is only useful if you're regularly checking bags or drinking on planes, but don't fly enough to have status with your chosen airline. The monthly dining credit makes you order from Grubhub or a tiny handful of chain restaurants. If you're going to Cheesecake Factory every single month, you don't need a new credit card that saves you ten bucks per trip; you need to re-evaluate your life. The grocery rewards are nearly matched by Amex's own no-fee Blue Cash card, and the Blue Cash option with a $100 AF beats it easily. About the only place where I can see this new Amex making sense long-term is "I'm a salesperson who regularly takes clients to expensive dinners, and can run the check through my personal credit card, but I don't do overnight travel very often." For everybody else, there's a better option.
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Oct 7, 2018 13:59
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hostile apostle posted:There's no limit on the route or cost of the paid fare. However, it can only be used on economy and it has to be done at the time of booking through Alaska only (no 3rd party site like kayak). It only works on Alaska metal, no partners. Also, companion fare is non refundable. One other important caveat on the companion fare: you have to buy the first ticket. You can't do a mileage redemption and then bolt a companion fare onto it. Also, it only works in coach; no getting two first class seats for the price of one and a bit. If you're MVP Gold you can apply your upgrades, though. It's still a pretty good deal if you can count on taking at least one long-distance trip with a partner every year on Alaska.
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Oct 21, 2018 05:25
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asur posted:Amex Platinum gives 5% back on airfare booked direct and 5% on both booked through Amex. They give 5 points per dollar, but MR points only redeem for cash at 0.6 cents/point. Total cash back is still just 3%.
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Jan 30, 2019 07:35
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TITTIEKISSER69 posted:I'm wondering if I should get a new credit card or stick with my current one. Don't ever get a rewards card if you can't pay off the balance in full every month. Rewards points cost banks money. Some of it is paid for with interchange fees, but a lot of it comes from people paying interest on their cards. Many people who pump a ton of money through these cards are business travelers who get regular reimbursement in full, and rich people who have no issue paying off their first class international flights and hotel suites every month. They pay no interest on their massive point hauls. Your interest isn't just paying for your points; it's paying for most of theirs, too. Also, your credit card isn't going to get you upgraded seats on long-haul flights. It might get you free checked bags, but instead of a credit card or airline fee, why not just save the ~$100 it'll cost either way and go for carry ons? If you have a single big expense you want to pay down every year, your best strategy is probably to open a no-fee card with a 0 intro APR offer every year, then pay it off before the interest hits. As long as you're not opening any other cards, having a single hard pull per year isn't going to do much to your credit score, and you'll save plenty on interest.
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Feb 17, 2019 05:20
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Residency Evil posted:This doesn't apply to CSR cards, right? It absolutely does. I got the notification a few days ago. This isn't a "premium" versus "non-premium" distinction. If you (and not your personal assistant at the family office) carry a card, then you get the "gently caress you" treatment.
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May 31, 2019 22:13
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JohnCompany posted:Amex Plat fee works out to $50/year so long as you 1) use the airline credit (and AA is one of the eligible airlines); 2) Uber at least once a month and 3) have occasion to buy something at Saks twice a year - and that's not even counting the pre-check/Global Entry credit. Also Miami has a centurion lounge. It's your call but I say go for it, particularly if you can get a 100k bonus. Why are you paying a ton of airline fees in a year? If you travel enough to make the Plat worth it, you should have enough status to get a free checked bag. Since you have to pick a single airline, it's not all that useful for "what if I end up needing to fly another airline where I don't have status" situations, either. Expensable flight changes should be pretty rare unless you have a habit of missing flights. The only thing left is buying inflight snacks and drinks. And even those aren't useful if you have decent status. Uber, OK. If you travel for business every month and put expenses on your personal card you can probably make that work. That's $200 off of $550. Of course, every month you manage to avoid traveling, you lose out on the credit. Saks? And not Off Fifth? gently caress that nonsense, if you can afford to shop at full-price department stores outside of special occasions then you don't need to care about points. What are you going to get for $50, a single house brand shirt that you probably wouldn't have bought there otherwise? The Global Entry credit is $20/year. How valuable. The Amex Plat can be worth it for a handful of reasons. If you bounce between hotel chains, the instant status is nice. The lounges are good if you're able to take advantage of them and don't want to sign up with a specific airline. And, if you pump a ton of airfare spending through the card, MR points rack up fast and are pretty valuable. Just don't kid yourself that the credits actually net out to a small annual fee.
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Jul 2, 2019 05:14
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Small White Dragon posted:Many cards offer rental protection, but only the CSP/CSR/UA cards offer primary coverage, which means that you don't have to also file with your car insurance (and risk increased premiums). Also every single Amex if you opt in to their enhanced coverage program. It costs about $20/rental, but if your main reason for keeping a high-AF card is rental insurance, the Amex program on a no-fee card is likely to come out ahead.
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Jul 6, 2019 03:22
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:So tell me if I have this generally right. With a CSR, if you ignore the side perks (like lounge access and car rental insurance, which I understand definitely have value), and the initial signup bonus and TSA pre-check credit (since those are basically only the first year) , in order to break even on the annual fee you’d have to charge about $5300 in travel (if you redeem your points for extra travel through Chase) or $7800 if you book travel elsewhere. Yes, your numbers are right. You can also look at them against a 2% card, since the Citi Double Cash is another option in the rewards space. If you want higher-end travel (business/first class flights, high-end hotels), you can sometimes squeeze quite a bit more than 1.5 cents/point out of transfers to loyalty programs, but it's a lot harder to come up with cash valuations there. If you're traveling regularly for work and charging expenses to your personal card, $5,300 in travel and dining-out expenses happens very quickly. If not, then you might want to look at other cards.
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Jul 7, 2019 17:39
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Ixian posted:Why not just opt out of it? I know it is a lovely thing they are doing, and they've made the opt out process more complicated than it should be on purpose, but here's the thing - it is still one of the best cards for travel, and pretty much every bank is lovely in their own way. If you're concerned about Chase doing sketchy things post-waiver, it doesn't really matter whether you opt in or out. The point of the class action waiver isn't to prevent you and a few buddies from getting together. It's there to make sure that it's not worth it for a law firm to take on any conceivable class action. That won't change on an individual level, and without some massive campaign that hasn't emerged, there won't be enough collective action to change that calculation.
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Jul 7, 2019 23:03
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:It's so bizarre that the credit system actively penalizes people for regularly using one or two credit cards like a normal person. There's a difference between something being theoretically sub-optimal and an actual penalty. If you have a couple of credit cards you keep at reasonable utilization, you can get to super-prime credit without trouble. Nobody will care that your FICO 8 score is 795 and not 830.
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Jul 26, 2019 17:16
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Vox Nihili posted:It's generally harmful to your credit score to close cards outright. This isn't right. A higher average age of accounts is better, but if you close a card, it sticks around on your credit report for several years. It just doesn't keep increasing its age, so your average age of accounts doesn't go up as fast. Closing out a line of credit will also mean your overall utilization percentage goes up, but that doesn't have any "memory" and is very easy to fix. So - while it's better to product change if you can, it's not going to actively hurt your credit score to close out an unused card. It just means that future growth might not be as fast, and you might need to be a bit more careful around utilization.
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Nov 3, 2019 00:24
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silence_kit posted:How much are miles worth in terms of 'effective cash back percentages'? People get really into credit cards, and I'm sure people have calculated effective cash back percentage rates for miles cards. The airline/miles travel cards are competing with no annual fee cash back cards which can give as much as 3% for travel. The effective cash back rates had better be pretty high, since airline miles are less useful than cash. Short answer: The Points Guy is a shill, but he maintains a roughly accurate "cent value per point" chart that can help you figure this stuff out. Long answer: With miles, a lot depends on exactly how you redeem them. For instance, I had a personal emergency where I needed to get across the Pacific on a couple of days' notice. I used pretty much my entire mileage balance with Alaska to redeem a business class ticket, so I would be a functioning human being when I landed. In that specific case, 65,000 Alaska miles got me a one way plane ticket that would have been $3,500 or so cash. Buying flights on the Alaska credit card gets you 3 miles per dollar, which meant that I got an effective ~15% cash back rate. But, that's several weird edge cases adding up on top of each other. The same flight in economy wouldn't have seen a huge discount in miles (something like 45k vs 65k), and the cash price of the ticket was hugely inflated because I was flying last minute. I could have spent the same miles doing a few $200 domestic short hop round trips for 25,000 miles each, which would be a pathetic return.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:47
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If you have a Costco membership, the Costco Citi card is good for gas. The yearly rewards cycle kind of stinks, and you get Citi customer service, but 4% for gas ain't bad - especially since it works at Costco, and most cards with a gas bonus only give it for ordinary fuel stations and not the places attached to grocery stores. The card's actual tap-to-pay implementation is good, too (unlike all the "premium metal" cards). Girbot posted:Turns out the decision of FNBO to drop the NRA card was more than just the black-lash last year. 
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Apr 13, 2020 18:51
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Dalrain posted:Very helpful, thanks so much for sharing! This will really save me a lot in a time when I need it, wouldn't have known about the bonus spend except for your posts. Bravo! It's not just a new bonus, either - it goes back a couple of months. If you're thinking about cashing out, better to jump on it today and squeeze as much as you can out of old grocery bills.
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Jun 6, 2020 19:42
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Citi uses FICO Bankcard 8 for credit card approvals. Remember, there's no one "real" score, and although standard FICO comes close for home and auto loans, banks are free to use whatever they want as long as it's not blatantly discriminatory and has some correlation to risk. Plenty of banks use Vantage for credit card approvals, too. FICO Bankcard is an odd duck of a score that weighs recent history and revolving cards more heavily than standard FICO, where the model wants to see installment loans and long history. FICO Bankcard basically acts like Vantage in that regard. It also goes up to 900 rather than 850 like FICO 8 and Vantage do. Anecdotally, my FICO Bankcard 8 and Vantage scores track within a few points of each other; they're both about 20 points higher than my standard FICO 8 score. I've got a good history with credit cards, but not too many installment loans. As far as I know, the only easy place to get your FICO Bankcard 8 score for free is through a Citi-branded credit card. If you've been rejected, they legally have to provide you the basis for the rejection upon request, so you may also be able to get it that way. Call the reconsideration line. Space Gopher fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 16:28
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Parrotine posted:Correct me if i'm wrong here, but isn't the main way of building solid credit primarily done via paying off things over a period of time instead of just one-shotting the expense? Family members have told me that if all you do is buy something using a CC and pay off the expense the next month it won't really end building up much credit at all, or at least nowhere near enough to get you approved for the big ticket items like loans or a mortgage. Credit card companies report two things each month to credit reporting agencies: * Your last statement balance * Whether you paid your bill on time, late, didn't pay it at all, or if there was no bill (say, because you didn't have any charges against the card in the last statement period) The point of your credit score is to show that you're a good risk - if a bank loans you money, you'll pay it back without any trouble. To make that work, you want to rack up a bunch of "paid this month's bill on time" entries, and show that you're not stretching yourself by using all the credit you've got. Putting a cheap bill like Netflix on the card, and setting it to auto-pay every month, will get you that history of on-time payments and low utilization. You don't need to pay a cent in interest to get this. There's a common misconception that your credit score is a measurement of how much the bank likes you - and, yes, they definitely like customers who carry a balance and pay interest (and maybe even the occasional fee for late payment or going over a credit limit). But, credit scores are only supposed to measure risk, not your profit potential to the bank. So, they track whether you pay your bill on time, and try to measure whether you're over-extended with things like utilization and recent credit applications. As you move out of secured cards, there's a bit of benefit in keeping that monthly statement balance number fairly high - it lets you ask the credit card company for a credit limit increase, so you can get the various benefits of a credit card (purchase/chargeback protection, rewards points, etc) without running at the red line of your limit and messing up your utilization. If you never put anything but Netflix on a card, they might not be super willing to give you a $20k limit - on the other hand, if you regularly put all your monthly expenses through your card, that's not out of the question. But - for that, it still doesn't matter whether you carry a balance, or pay the card in full every month. The best strategy is to treat your credit card like a delayed debit card, put expenses through it, and then pay it off in full every single time.
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Jul 13, 2020 20:30
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smackfu posted:I swear when I was in college it was pretty easy to get $1000 or $2000 limit real credit cards with basically no credit history, because they wanted to suck you into the credit life style. Have times changed? Yes, if you went to college before 2007 or so. That financial crisis made banks tighten up access to credit, and it's never gotten quite as loose as it was. A lot of universities also came up with rules against some of the most predatory practices (free water bottle! Just sign here!) Also, college students have historically had special status when it comes to getting credit. Banks know that college students tend to come from a wealthier background than the general population of young people, and that a lot have parents willing and able to bail them out of financial mistakes. A 19 year old college freshman will have a lot easier time getting their first credit card than a 23 year old who's either out of college, or never went in the first place.
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Jul 17, 2020 23:15
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Parrotine posted:Has anyone ever heard of site/service called Experian? The catch is that they really, really want access to your detailed spending data, and they think that "improving your credit score" is enough of a carrot that you'll hand over your bank account credentials. Of course, they'll also try to upsell you to the various consumer credit monitoring services they sell, too. The information they collect apparently feeds into FICO 8, 9, and recent VantageScore models - as long as that score is calculated with Experian data. I think it just treats utility bills as a revolving credit account up to two years old. I wouldn't do it, but I'm saying that as someone who already has a solid credit score. If you really need access to credit, it's possible that it's worth it.
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Aug 17, 2020 17:58
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GreenBuckanneer posted:My friend needs a balance transfer card to help pay down her credit amount. If she has solid credit, the Citi Double Cash actually has some very good balance transfer offers. 0% for 18 months and a reasonable transfer fee. The catches: -She can't use it for any ordinary purchases until she has gotten rid of the transferred balance and get back into a grace period. It's a rewards card, so the interest isn't great, and carrying a transferred balance means she won't get grace period interest on purchases. - She absolutely has to have a clear plan and discipline to zero the balance within the 0% transfer interest window. Again, it's a rewards card, so the interest is brutal. It's very easy to dig a deeper hole with 0% balance transfers. There's a reason Citi is offering these deals: it's because they are betting their customers will fail at clearing their balances. She shouldn't take the other side of that bet unless she has good reasons to be certain she'll win.
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Aug 17, 2020 18:28
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Malcolm XML posted:Why do people recommend the citi card over the paypal one which is 2% w/o any oddball conditions? In this specific situation: the double cash has a very good balance transfer offer, and the post was about balance transfers In general: there aren’t any “oddball conditions” on the double cash (unlike a credit card that forces you to redeem cash back into your PayPal account), and although Citi is a garbage bank with godawful IT and customer service, they’re still better than noted “we’re technically not a bank, and that account you have with us isn’t a checking or savings account, so you don’t get consumer protections, and that balance is ours now” company PayPal
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Aug 19, 2020 19:11
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