@aberrant wrote:A little background, I applied and was accepted for a Chase Freedom card back in December of last year with an initial $5000 credit line. Today is close to the six month mark and I wanted to try for a credit limit increase. So I called up Chase using the backdoor number to the executive offices. I spoke with a woman named Elissa, she was very pleasant to deal with. I began giving her some background as to why I wanted the increase. I told her that I'm tired of the crappy Bank of America rewards and that I was recently approved for the AMEX platinum card. I mentioned that I would like to continue to make charges on my Freedom card but with the amount I spend a $5,000 limit wont award me a sufficient enough utilization and with the Platinum card I would like to see Chase offer me some competitve advantage to encourage me to charge more on my Freedom card than my Platinum. She alerted me that chase would need to verify my income, etc, etc. and that it was a hard pull. I mentioned to her that I had no problem verifying my income but a hard inquiry was out of the question. I reiterated the fact that I need more of an incentive to spend money with Chase over AMEX and she said that she can put in a request for a soft inquiry and will get back to me in the next day. She also asked how much of an increase I wanted. I told her I believe an 8k limit would offer me sufficient utilization on the card (a 3k increase). I got off the phone with her and waited. Sure enough I logged in this morning to my Chase account to see a nice 8k credit limit! Now I'm not sure if this was a unique situation or if the threat of another competitor but it's certainly worth it to defend why you want the increase and let them know a hard pull is unacceptable.
So I'm excited but I will also be watching my credit report over the next couple of weeks and months to make sure that she wasn't lying about the soft pull. If she was indeed going to do a hard pull I don't see why she would have had to wait a day for it to process... good luck to the rest of you with Chase! Ask for Elissa if you call the backdoor executive offices.
December...six months...huh?
