Hi Cybergal, Please provide some more details. What is your total combined credit limits on these cards? The problem is that virtually all lenders will frown upon high utilization. $8,000 @ 28.99 is definitely not a good situation. Have you called your creditor to ask for a lower APR? I would first try this. Applying probably won't cause you much damage but I'm not too sure what your chances of approval are with this much debt.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Situation: I have $20,000 in cc debt, currently on 3 credit cards, highest is $8,000 @ 28.99. I'd love to apply for another lower intro rate card and transfer that one card's balance to help me to catch up.
My question is will I get turned down and negatively impact my FICO even further? Any experience with this or advice??? Thanks!
Cybergal,
We were recently in a very similar situation and are working our way out. We have about 22000 in CC debt, that was sitting right around 80-85% utilization. We have a Ch. 7 BK that was discharged 06/2001 and really felt restricted to the accounts that we had and they started ratejacking us. (Providian is the worse!!!
) We called several times and no one was willing to lower the rates. We talked to our CU and they would only give us a personal loan if we put up the note on our 2nd car, which would have raised our insurance so was a no go.Anyway, once we reached the 7 year mark, I decided to be brave and apply for new cards. (The Ch. 7 will still be on there another 3 years but I think 7 years is a great crossroads.) I also chose to get some rewards cards so that, like so many posters on here, we could earn some rewards for $ we spend anyway.
The big successes are 2 new WaMu accounts with 8K limits and 3 new Barclay's accounts totalling 8k. It dropped our utilization down to about 43%. We now have most of our CC debt BT's to 0% until next Spring. The only remaining issue is our Providian (can't use WaMu to pay off) but I think with the accounts we've zeroed, we'll be able to break it up and transfer it soon. HTH