@nwmusic wrote:
My current balances / APR's are as follows (In order of APR)
@card 1: $400 credit line/ $361.40 balance @ 26.99%
@card 2: $700 credit line/ $331.10 balance @ 26.24% ($300 of this balance is at 0% until march 2017)
@card 3: $700 credit line/ $425.31 balance @ 24.24%
@card 4: $1200 Credit line/ $954.88 balance @Anonymous.80%
@card 5: $700 Credit line/ $554.54 balance @ 20.15%
@card 6: $1750 Credit Line/ $1600.00 balance @ 18.15%
@card 7: $1000 Credit Line/ $900 balance @ 0% until 6/2017
.
What are the names on these other mystery cards? Are some of them store cards?
Is there a Balance Transfer Fee from PenFed to transfer amounts onto this new AMEX card? Looks like a 3% fee on balance transfers, even though the APR is 0%? Be careful about what you move, for these tiny balances, and with your expected pay off timing. For example, on the card with 26% APR, if you pay it off in two months, you will have paid about 3%-4% on that existing balance, paying it off in place. If you BT it over to the PenFed card, then you will pay the 3% fee anyway, so not a huge gain by pushing the amount to the PenFed card, but it will indeed boost your utilization on the PenFed card. When paid in place on card 1, that card is just decreasing utilization.
Baseline strategy: For all cards, Pay only the minimum payment on each card / line plus $10 per month over the minimum payment, and of course pay by the payment due date.
Transfer from card 6 to the PenFed card: $1,700
Transfer from card 5 to the PenFed card: $500
Transfer $500 from card 4 to the PenFed card.
After these transfers, pay the PenFed card well over the minimum, at about $100 per month until the other cards are done, then of course all extra funds go to paying the PenFed off.
Month 1: Pay card 1 with any extra funds. You said $500 per month? After all the minimums are covered, the rest goes to card 1.
Next month pay card 3 with any extra funds.
Ensure card 2 is paid off by April (an extra month of a bit of interest isn't going to hurt)
Pay off card 4.
Ensure card 7 is paid to zero by July / August 2017.
You aren't going to get out of paying fees or interest, so the main point is to try to minimize those costs where you can, not get too quick to move things around and incur other fees. You also want to manage your cash flow in a sustainable way.
Still an open question what those other cards are, because that does relate to whether they get used again, whether they have BT offers that might be used, whether they have rewards that might influence when you want them available to use sooner.
Good luck!
True, Cap One terms say no BT fee, same APR, but my actual experience is there is no interest charged in the first or last month when BT to a Capital One card.
So if a Capital One card has no balance, no charges on it, and you BT onto the card just after the statement prints, and you see the next statement, there should be no interest cost in that first month statement. Pay it off after that second statement, by the due date for payment, and you should see no interest cost the second month either.
I have used this several times with a three month sequence, only the middle month gets a small interest cost. It is an option to consider, moving amounts off the smaller Cap One early, for example to set it to zero ( and you only need to leave it zero for a few days, not necessarily wait for statement to print zero) then moving balances from another small card to that Cap One, to avoid the PenFed BT fee, and halt the interest calculation on some portion of the items you are paying down.
@nwmusic wrote:If Utilization being at 75% on the AMEX isn't going to kill my score, I think I will do the following:
Pay off card 2 (This will be happening in two days)
Balance transfer cards 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 - This will put a balance on my AMEX of $3896.13 which puts me at 77.92% Utilization on that line, however 5 lines will have 0% utilization.
Leave the balance on card 7 and pay it down seperately as this card is at zero percent already. Need to get utilization under 30% though which will happen within 30 days.
Thoughts? I don't want penfed to think I'm overextending myself.
No, this calculation is wrong. Your balance on PenFed will be $4,012, not $3,896 because you will pay 3% fees to get the money onto PenFed. There is a $116 fee to get the money over to PenFed.
The 75% utilization on the PenFed card will cause you to lose some points, more than 1, less than 50 but as others have noted, the objective is to try to save interest cost, not so much to worry about score. If you can get the other cards to zero balance and keep them at zero, that will provide some help on score, but the 75% will be a drag for a while.
And I hope you notice I'm calling the card a PenFed card, since that is the bank issuing the card.
An AMEX card is issued by Centurion Bank, and is a different bank than cards which are only utilizing the American Express payment network, as a branded item on another bank's credit card.