mrgoattoo Tracker

Re: OK to put car down payment on CC?

mrgoattoo — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:46:16 GMT

electra wrote:
Should be getting my new car in about a week. Was wondering if it's ok to run the down payment on my CC (NFCU Cash rewards)? I would pay it off immediately but I figured that would be a great way to get some cash back. Is this a no-no? Navy has been very good to me and don't want to do anything that would piss them off.

I got a 'balance transfer' for 3% to buy a used car (about $5000 in all) on my Citibank card and 0% APR for a year.

I doubt you'd be able to use the credit card as a credit card to pay for a car but you might be able to have the card provider to the same and do a balance transfer and just drop the money directly into your checking acct like we did.

Citibank is great like that. Ihave a $10000 credit line and they will give me cash in the form of a balance transfer up to the CL. Doing it that way its not the huge 20% APR like when you draw cash out on the card at an ATM.

Re: Closing Credit Card if Offered a new one.

mrgoattoo — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:29:37 GMT

epicblue wrote:
I have a basic credit card with a $300 limit that I've had for 3 years now. The same bank just sent me a letter saying I'm qualified for there platinum credit card. I don't really want to have that many credit cards. (I currently have 3). I assume the platinum card will have a higher limit, and some better benifits.

Should I close the basic $300 dollar card and open the platinum card?

PS. After a year of opening the basic card, they declined my request for a credit line increase because I didn't really have established credit history.

If you close your oldest account its possible youre going to take a hit on your credit score.

Re: Barclaycard MC

mrgoattoo — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:44:45 GMT

LS2982 wrote:
mrgoattoo wrote:
I got a pre approved BC MC app in the mail.
It has 18 months 0% apr and then the regular APR is lower than a couple of my cards so I decided to apply and see what CL they offered.
Turned out to be $4500 starting which is more than twice what two of my cards are with about 8% lower APR to boot, so I am going to keep the card and close one of those other accounts most likely (or just keep them all, havent decided since I dont want to mess much with my average account age too much).

Anyway, I hadnt even heard of Barclayscard before so Im interested in knowing the ups and downs of the company from those who have had a CC from them.
CONGRATS!!!

Barc lays can be nit picky about new accounts during the 1st 6 months of your account opening. If you must app keep it to 1 or 2 apps no more. They review accounts every 6 months and if your files are looking good and you've taken care of the account they give auto luv. Any CLI request is a HP. Be careful requesting HP CLI's as an analyst will manually review your file and if you've applied for alot of new credit they can do AA on your account.

The only other card I got more recently was my StateFarm and it was certainly showing when I applied for the Barclays yesterday so that shouldnt be a problem.

I dont generally apply at all anymore, but when we switched over to StateFarm for all of our insurance I figured Id apply for their card and see what happened.

CapitalOne has been riding the wife and I for months sending that $25000 pre approved loan application over and over. Not sure if getting that in the mail causes any red flags or not but we just shred and trash them ASAP.

Re: Barclaycard MC

mrgoattoo — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:37:24 GMT

It shows the Rewards on my account. Seems to be the case because Im seeing how I get the points for a lot of various purchase per $ spent.

enharu wrote:
did you get the arrival, or the rewards?

as for UP side.........they pull TU, which is a big plus for me since no one else pulls TU for my scenario. I am in socal. 2% rewards on all purchases for my Arrival.

Down side.......they're extremely app, inquiry and new account sensitive. Their website looks outdated and clumsy. Hold times to talk to CSR is noticeably longer compared to Chase / Wells Fargo / Discover. They don't seem to upgrade people to world elite MC.

I've only got my card for about a week though :D

Re: absolutely furious w amex

mrgoattoo — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:34:05 GMT

I have eight credit cards all better than what was given by AmEx.

AmEx can take a flying leap if they dont want to play nice for all I care.

Citibank, Discover, Statefarm and even my NRA card are ALL better then AmEx as far as I'm concerned. Better APR and CL's.

Why stress over an AmEx card when there are dozens of better options

aleicgrant wrote:
Got my bce cli decline letter today. Reason was balances to too high. Well I paid off 85% of my debt..the kicker is the soft pull was done on March 23.... not the day of the request. Whats worse the guy ai am speaking with is a total a hole. What happened to amex world class service. He wants me to send in a full copy of my report. **bleep** would amex use.a report almost 30 days old. Absolutely sick of this amex bs

Barclaycard MC

mrgoattoo — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:27:21 GMT

I got a pre approved BC MC app in the mail.

It has 18 months 0% apr and then the regular APR is lower than a couple of my cards so I decided to apply and see what CL they offered.

Turned out to be $4500 starting which is more than twice what two of my cards are with about 8% lower APR to boot, so I am going to keep the card and close one of those other accounts most likely (or just keep them all, havent decided since I dont want to mess much with my average account age too much).

Anyway, I hadnt even heard of Barclayscard before so Im interested in knowing the ups and downs of the company from those who have had a CC from them.

Re: Question about the MYFICO credit monitoring

mrgoattoo — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:46:00 GMT

Cool. Thanks.

I wasnt sure how it worked.

twall06 wrote:
No time frame is the same you can buy a report whenever you want it will not change your quaterly date

Question about the MYFICO credit monitoring

mrgoattoo — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:58:32 GMT

We are paying for the $5/ month credit monitoring here for myself and the wife.

With that we get quarterly TU credit reports.

Both of our credit scores were updated on 1/6/13 along with the new report.

On 1/27 I updated mine and then again on 2/3 because of some oddity I thought I was seeing when I applied for a StateFarm Visa (very large discrepancy in the score they pulled vs the one I was seeing here).

As stated we get quarterly updates on the score and report...so will my upcoming update be based on the 1/6/13 date like it should....or will my having updated it early February screw me over so I dont get one around 4/6/13 based on the 1/6 date for the last quartery update, but rather on when I manually updated on 2/3/13....ie did updating it manually throw the whole quarterly updating timeframe off?

Re: Chase slashed credit limit..

mrgoattoo — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:22:26 GMT

littlesister wrote:
Applied over the weekend for a chase amazon visa like an idiot and received a denial because of debt.
So I log on today to my chase freedom and they cut my likit from 5000 to 2900!!
Thats 300 more then my balance so now its gonna kill my score and report. Its gonna look like I maxedd the card out.
I called and they wont budge. I just received a boa visa signature card so Im confused. So anyways, I paid my balance in full and will close my card
once it updates. I also wrote to CEO Jaimie Dimon and asked how he liked it when they slashed his paycheck and told him thats how I feel now.

When Chase took over Washington Mutual they slashed both my wife and my CL in half.

I closed both accounts pretty quickly and told them to take a hike. We have far too many CC's to worry about Chase.

A while later I put in apps for both of us and they gave her $5000 (after cutting her from 1800 to 900 on her old card, go figure). They wouldnt give me much because they say I have too much available credit (I do for my income level, Im sure).

We bank at Chase and its been sort of fine, but I wont apply for any more CC's with them ever.

Re: Too Many New Accounts?

mrgoattoo — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:16:54 GMT

tonikay68 wrote:
It amazes me to see consumers /customers/credit card holders with an overabundance of Credit Cards. To have to submit a payment each month for each card, is overwhelming . These consumers or credit card holders must have good paying jobs, or they may be a doctor, lawyer invester, business owner. I have Two Cards One from Capital One and First Premier Bank.. I'm considering applying for one more. But when i think those monthly payments are due. I have to think alittle harder about it..To tempting...

I have 8 cards myself and Im an AU on about 4 more of my wifes. We dont make a lot of money, we just use our credit line wisely.

Re: what happens if a spouse dies?

mrgoattoo — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:01:13 GMT

OhioCPA wrote:
Ohio isn't a community property state, so that might be part of it. I assume they could come after joint owned assets, or the car since it was security on the note.

Actually the car was bought with a 'balance transfer' where they just deposited cash into my account from a credit card that could have been used for anything so there is nothing attaching the car to the loan. I did it this way so I didnt have to have full coverage insurance to keep the insurance cost down but when we changed over to StateFarm it as so much cheaper then our Geico insurance that we ended up with full coverage with 10 times the coverage, 10 times the renters coverage and a huge liability umbrella for just a little more ($14 a month additional) anyway.

The main reason I asked the question was the wife wondered, for instance, if I had gone nuts on my CC's and then died would she be responsible for it even though she had nothing to do with the charges.

Re: what happens if a spouse dies?

mrgoattoo — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:21:35 GMT

OhioCPA wrote:
As I understand, the decedent's estate would be responsible for the debt. If the estate is not solvent, then the bank would lose out.

Thats what I thought I was understanding as I was reading about Ohio law but wasnt sure.

I wonder why they cant come directly after the surviving spouse since the debt was likely taken on during the marriage?

what happens if a spouse dies?

mrgoattoo — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:37:39 GMT

Just curious

I live in Ohio and was wondering what happens when a spouse owes money on a credit card and dies and the other spouse isnt on their accounts.

The wife and I have a number of credit cards that are in our own names, no joint accounts, and I have a balance on the one for a car and we got to wondering if I were to pass away if she could be responsible for that card even though its not a joint account.

Re: ...Re: VERY confused FICO...

mrgoattoo — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:53:30 GMT

GregB wrote:
Sometimes you can see that the reps are making statements based upon your account and sometimes they seem to use canned or generic answers that have little to do with you.

"too much credit available" rarely makes sense unless you have a very short history or no record of using any of the credit that you have. Some creditors report "Amount of last payment" and some Credit Reports show that information. Since you can't be sure they are seeing that info, it is usually best to allow the statement to generate and then pay in full. If you pay before the statement generates, some creditors may not see the use of the account.

Creditors offer you credit when they want new business and according to the risk they want to take at that moment. Chase may have opened you at $500 more because of their situation than yours. A new account is generally not way above or way below your other credit limits but sometimes they are way off. Chase lowered my limits on my two accounts, while CapOne, Discover, BofA, and Amex have raised my limits during the same time. It clearly has more to do with them than it does with me. Amex drastically reduced my limits before that when they were having problems.

What happened then was they gave me $200 CL at first. But at the same time gave the wife $5000 on her card.

I called them and told them to cancel because I have way too much credit to be fooling around with that low of a limit so they upped it to $500. I let it go until now because I use the card sometimes to buy stuff on Amazon and get triple points, but the wifes Amazon chase has a $5000 limit so there really isnt any need to be spreading earned points over the two cards anyway.

Initially they gave me three other reasons why they wouldnt go higher on the CL, none of them made sense so I pursued it more and finally they came back with 'You have too much available credit' and thats where we've been since.

Oddly enough Citibank during all this was giving me one CLI after another without even running a credit check and has been at me every couple months to let them put more cash into my checking account for whatever I want to spend it on. Its nice to know its there but I dont need to get into any serious debt.

I think my previous bad credit from years ago may be more of a factor for Chase than just having too much available credit that I never use.

...Re: VERY confused FICO...

mrgoattoo — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:24:24 GMT

And I forgot to mention the rest...

I asked her about the CL for the new SF CC and she said they gave me $5000 for starters which I was a little amazed by seeing that the Chase card I just cancelled that this one was to replace refused to give me more than $500 because they say I have too much credit available.

Just called chase and thanked them for the credit line but said I wanted to cancel because I really have no need for a $500 CL because of the way we use our cards which is using them for ALL of our purchases each month then paying the whole balance end of month. $500 bare covers groceries for a month...

Re: VERY confused FICO...

mrgoattoo — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:20:42 GMT

Thanks for the insight, Greg.

I guess while Ive come to understand what creditors like to see on a credit history, the scoring itself still confounds me except the part about getting it higher, which seems to be just a half a dozen points or so that seem to be pretty consistent....ie pay on time, pay more than the minimum payment, dont borrow too much too fast, be consistent with your finances, etc, etc.....ie dont send any red flags to lenders that you may be in financial trouble or be irresponsible with credit, which I guess at the end of the day is about all we can do to improve our credit anyway.

Re: VERY confused FICO...

mrgoattoo — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:44:34 GMT

It gets even better.

Talked to a rep at the SF area who issues the CC's and she was telling me that while you may have a 'score' with whatever agency when an inquiry is made that the lender may get a 'modified' credit score that is based on things like CC's or other types of credit specifically and it wont be the same as the score you are seeing when you check, which I guess is more generic rather than specific.

Makes me think that the conclusion I had the other day was right. Stop worrying about the score and just keep my credit report clean....

Re: VERY confused FICO...

mrgoattoo — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:26:56 GMT

Good grief...its worse than I thought.

"Do the NextGen risk models differ from the Classic FICO risk models in what they predict? What’s the range of possible scores?
The NextGen risk models, like the Classic FICO risk models, are designed to rank-order consumers according to the likelihood of default on credit obligations. Both scores are three digit numbers, with the higher values indicating lower risk; however, due to its refined risk assessment, the range of possible scores is greater for NextGen than for Classic FICO. The NextGen score range is 150-950, compared to the 300-850 for Classic U.S. FICO risk scores and 250-900 for Classic FICO industry option scores."

http://riskbasedlending.com/clientsonly/NextGen%20FICO%20Risk%20Score%20Conversion%20FAQ_218.pdf

I think Im going to quit thinking about my score and just keep my report clean. All these scores and apparently multiple ones from FICO itself, is just too much to keep track of or worry about.

Re: VERY confused FICO...

mrgoattoo — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:24:22 GMT

Shogun wrote:
There are reasons why scores don't match sometimes. First off, it could be a CC enhanced score which will put more emphasis on your revolving accounts in scoring. The TU pulled here is a TU98, and they could have pulled a different model.

Thanks for the help.

I guess the score is irrelevant for the most part except to watch for any changes which is what I do with the free FAKO Experian score the wife and I get every month with our US Bank cards (theyre at least good for something)

Probably just keep paying the $10 a month for the basic package here for the two of us. $5/month isnt bad to get a quarterly FICO and credit report. At least helps me keep an eye out for changes

Re: VERY confused FICO...

mrgoattoo — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:20:43 GMT

bettercreditguy1 wrote:
What you are seeing at this site is a True FICO score. What you are viewing from SF is probably a VANTAGE SCORE, which is based on an alogrithm created internally by TU for competition against Fico. THey use different scales (Fico tops at 850, Vantage 950), thus you can not linearly compare the scores. Additionally, Fico has 49 distinct scoring models each proprietary for specific industries, some which are auto, mortage, credit card, life, and other insurance offered products. The model used here is TU98, a little bit older model, yet still used by many financial istitutions today. Hope this helps. In the final analysis, which ever model you follow, always strive to increase your oldest reported number and you will be on the correct path to a better credit reporting history and score. Good Luck!

Thanks for the information.

I had just updated my FICO score a couple weeks ago.

Wish I'd have caught on that it was a different model BEFORE I wasted the $16 updating it again to see what was up.

With Christmas just being over throwing more money away wasnt a very good idea but I couldnt accept that just having a new inquiry would have dragged my score down 30 points. Turns out it didnt affect the MYFICO score at all. The new inquiry is there but the score was unnaffected so I guess the up side is my world isnt coming to an end or anything.

I applied for the SF CC so I can toss my chase card with the $500 limit that they refuse to raise because Chase says I have too much available credit. It was worse than pulling finger nails to get them to finally admit that that was the reason they denied me a larger limit while all my other cards, even BOA, gave me at least $2000...and CapOne even increased me to $4500 during the same period. My NRA CC limit was also increased at my request to $4000 after Chase said I had too much credit so Im beginning to think that Chase is just being stingy with their credit lines and I dont have much need for a $500 limit since we use the cards for all of our purchases in the month, pay them off then trade out for for another card the next month.

Also figured since StateFarm has been really good to us I'd use their card for the autopay for the premiums every month.