@coldfusion wrote:
@Remedios wrote:
@designated_knitter wrote:Synchrony is weird... they love some people... others not so much.
While everyone here was saying CLIs fall down from the skies like Manna from Heaven after just 3-4 months, nothing for me on any of my Synchrony cards. It got to be a game to guess which obscure reason they would pick this time.
After having tried with the various cards for 3 or more years, I wound up closing my oldest... Sam's Club which they had CLD'd to from 500 to 230 bucks due to a late payment in 2016.
Had PayPal Credit since 11/2019 and no CLI despite high usage and perfect big payments. Same with Ammy which I got in 9/2020.
Then today, figured I would go for my monthly dose of rejection and was shocked to pick up 4400 bucks across the 3 trade lines.
What changed between now and my last attempt? Mainly having gotten approved for LOTS of new credit in the last 2 months. Went from less than 13K to 36k since March.
Im almost wondering if Synchrony saw other banks giving me credit and figured it was safe to give me more...I figured they would have been spooked and was actually expecting AA.
It seems like credit begets credit. The more you get, suddenly, your scores improve and other lenders start granting CLIs to stay competitive.
I know that goes against all empirical data but makes as much sense as anything else out there.
Plus, with the economy improving and people having paid down debt over the last year, they may be trying to lure people back to using their cards.
Synchrony doesn't work like that.
In fact, they used to hand out very high credit lines where other (more traditional) lenders hesitated to give $1000.00.
That's what made them famous for utilization padding. Holding onto those lines is completely another story.
Your utilization would have been much higher prior to new approvals, so now it might look better in terms of percentage games.
They certainly do not give CLIs to stay competitive. Their UW isn't static, sometimes they just give, other times they tighten down a bit.
One thing is for certain, multiple CLI requests accross multiple accounts have had some less than desirable effects with some profiles.
Hopefully, they don't decide to close any once the attention is drawn to the accounts.
Sometimes people have fun poking bears, sometimes bear has fun after being poked.
There is a running thread in the CC forum (Remi would know the one I'm referring to, I'm not directing my comment to her but to members here at large) that started last summer when multiple members discovered that SYNC had closed all of their cards even with an unblemished record of usage and payment. In a number of cases the only anomaly was that they had applied for and received CLIs across multple SYNC cards over the previous several months. Nowadays considering what you might gain vs. what you might lose is warranted.
Well, I know my utilization was under 10 percent in March prior to addition of my new credit lines ... mostly due to 0 percent balance transfers that I did took advantage of but did not report until mid-April.
I never saw the threads about Synchrony closures after granting multiple CLIs. At this point, nothing I can do about that... I may have poked something not realizing it was a bear. I know that my Comenity CLIs are basically on the same schedule so figured it was just how things were done.
If Synchrony does shut me down, of course I'll be mad and disappointed. However, fortunately, it won't be the end of the world at this point. I survived having my all of my only major trade lines shut down in one fell swoop (looking at you, Cap1!). At this point, I'm in much better shape -- much more diverse portfolio, added Navy to the mix, in the good graces of my local NCSECU primary FI.
Obviously, y'all know better than I do... I haven't read all the many years of each individual data points. I have no intention of maxing out my new Synchrony credit limits. I'm not adding additional credit lines at the moment so they have full access to all of my recent activity so figured they were comfortable with the exposure.
If my 8000 total credit exposure with Synchrony is what makes them skittish and need to shut me down, well, lesson learned.
