Personal Credit Thread

[dodint]

Ouch.

[NTP66]

Sounds like a shitty card, to be honest.

[tifosi77]

lol

It's a Citi AAdvantage card.

[NTP66]

Hahaha, now it makes perfect **** sense.

[NTP66]

And by that, I mean it makes no sense. I opened 27ish of those cards over a four year period, and put $4-5k on it in a single day - multiple times. Never once saw a decrease in CL, and in fact used to lower the CL myself so that I could continue applying for cards with a limit large enough to meet the bonus spend requirements.

Ah, the okayish old days.

[mac5155]

Do Cali hospitals not offer payment plans for medical bills? I get interest free options on all my bills and you best believe I take advantage of that.

[skullman80]

Yeah I rack up a **** ton of charges for all my phlebotomy stuff...and I just payment plan that through UPMC and set it as long as I can. No interest. I pay it off when I can etc. It's still insane that healthcare costs as much as it does even with insurance, but it takes the sting out a little bit I guess.

[tifosi77]

I honestly have no idea what my payment options are/were. This was my first time dealing with in-patient care as a adult; someone came into my room with a credit card machine and an invoice and through the haze of my IV I went to town.

[mac5155]

that's ridiculous and so american at the same time.

[DigitalGypsy66]

Yeah, that's really disturbing to come in with a credit card machine. What a country.

[NTP66]

For those of you with Chase cards that have rotating categories (Freedom Flex, etc.), the April-June 5% categories are Amazon and Select Streaming Services (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Netflix, Sling, Vudu, Fubo TV, Apple Music, SiriusXM, Pandora, Spotify and YouTube TV).

[mikey]

Paying for your own wedding.

Dear adults,

My application to adulthood is currently pending. Assuming that I get accepted, I have a question about the whole marriage dealy...we both have v dumb parents (well, my dad is smart...but was self employed all of his life until his body couldn't hold up any longer) and they have no money. So, we're going to have to pay for our wedding. We're big party people, so we're going to have a big wedding. Naturally, this is going to be a $20,000 venture or so...whatever the number is.

My thought is: We can probably take advantage of a credit card opportunity (naturally, 0% interest for X time or X purchases or enough of a sign-on bonus that it would offset the interest) for this. Any experience with this?

For the record, I personally have the assets (i.e. even if she doesn't contribute a dime) to pay this all off at any moment. It would be a little annoying, but it'd be doable. So I'm not doing anything outside of my means. I'm just looking for a way to weaponize a huge spend and see if any of y'all have done this or there's anything I'm not adult enough to consider...

Maximum Respect,
mikey

[DigitalGypsy66]

That sounds like @NTP66 's music

[NTP66]

My wedding was under $500, so not entirely accurate.

I almost wonder if you could get better deals by paying cash, saving you more money compared to a sign up bonus and the equivalent cash back. I’m trying to think of how you could make payments for stuff like that, but am coming up empty. That’s usually a balance transfer deal, and I’m not sure you want to go down the road of throwing $20k in a card, getting the bonus, then transferring to a 0% APR balance transfer card to pay off over 12-18 months.

[Troy Loney]

https://thepointsguy.com/credit-cards/rewards/

Would it just be looking for the card that has the best signup deal?

[Nuge]

We signed up for a Hyatt card (I think it was a capital one card) that gave us two free nights at any Hyatt and put some wedding stuff on it. We used one of the rooms at the Hyatt attached to the airport because we were flying out early for our honeymoon. We paid off the balance immediately and canceled the card after we used the second free night.

[mac5155]

I was going to mention somehow trying to get a card that may give you a free or close to free honeymoon. Maybe get two cards, an airfare one and a hotel or resort one. Or the venture card seems to be the favorite amongst travelers.

[NTP66]

This is lame:

The Costco Visa card from Citi is discontinuing the Extended Warranty effective January 22, 2023. No warranty will be provided for purchases made on or after that date. Coverage for purchases made before that date will continue to be available, and you may continue to file for benefits in accordance with the current benefit terms.

[NTP66]

Resurrecting this thread. Just paid my final credit card bill of 2022, and went through all accounts to add up all of my rewards from this past year.

Discover: $149.65
Chase Sapphire Preferred: $773.10 (69147 UR); travel redeemed w/ 25% bonus
Chase Freedom Flex: $241.89 (24189 UR)
Chase Amazon Prime: $326.86 (32686 points)
Chase Ink Cash: $79.94 (7994 UR)
Costco Executive + Visa: $70.29
Subtotal: $1641.73
Total: $1089.340 ($552.33 in Chase UR currently waiting to be redeemed)

This is definitely my best return overall to date.

[dodint]

I really don't like revolving credit so I think I'm going to pay all my cards off by the end of the year and then close them out. I plan to keep my oldest card open and empty as it will be my oldest line of credit.
In terms of credit score shenanigans, there isn't much advantage to keeping the other two open, right? My revolving debt utilization will remain at 0% anyway, the only difference would be the amount of credit I would be managing. It would be $2500 instead of $25000.

I might be trying to buy an investment property in about two years so I'd like to get the score up as high as possible in that time. And then in about five years I plan to buy a plane and would like to get good terms there.

[NTP66]

I really don't like revolving credit so I think I'm going to pay all my cards off by the end of the year and then close them out. I plan to keep my oldest card open and empty as it will be my oldest line of credit.
In terms of credit score shenanigans, there isn't much advantage to keeping the other two open, right? My revolving debt utilization will remain at 0% anyway, the only difference would be the amount of credit I would be managing. It would be $2500 instead of $25000.

I might be trying to buy an investment property in about two years so I'd like to get the score up as high as possible in that time. And then in about five years I plan to buy a plane and would like to get good terms there.

You'd think, but your credit score will certainly take a hit just based on the lower credit utilization from closing those cards. It's dumb and makes little sense, but it's definitely something I can personally confirm. That said, it was never a big hit to me, and the score always rose relatively quickly after closing a card. If you've got two years before you really need your score to be at its peak, I wouldn't worry about this one bit.

[dodint]

Nice, thanks!

[tifosi77]

You can certainly have too much debt. But imo there's no such thing as too much credit.

The only reason I'd suggest closing an existing credit account is if you have a history of mismanagement and just don't want to deal with it any longer. (S**t happens, run the card through the shredder and close up shop.) But if you're fine managing things, then I'd suggest instead just locking the cards up and not using them vs closing the accounts altogether. Better to have and not need than need and not have, as the saying goes. The idea of only having $2500 to tap into on demand kind of sketches me out; in the past 20 months, we've had over 10x that amount in unplanned emergency expenses pop up out of nowhere (between house repairs and medical stuff). Life has a s**ty way of negatively impacting your utilization.

But if you do want to close up, check the age difference between the oldest and next oldest accounts. If they're less than a couple years apart, I think it would be worth it to compare the accounts and member benefits of each card. I don't think a 16-year credit history is significantly better than a 14-year credit history, and as NTP says the hit is negligible and temporary, anyways.

[dodint]

We have the HELOC for those big things. I really just want to be rid of revolving lines of credit that carry 16.99-24.99% interest rates. If I have some kind of need for emergency credit I would be better off using the HELOC or opening up a PSL.

I thought about paying them off and just locking them, but I imagine USAA will just terminate the card after a few months of no activity. And I'm much better at abstention than moderation. Maybe the ticket would be closing out these cards and after the credit bounces back, opening a card with a reasonable rate. I don't care about rewards and stuff, they just encourage you to spend more.

[NTP66]

Back when I was churning Citi AA cards, I was closing them every 4 months. Every card had a $10-20k limit right from the start, and I don't think my credit score ever dropped more than 20 points. And I had twenty-seven of those bad boys.