@Anonymous wrote:Laptop broke and have been sharing my girl friends laptop since july for school. I decided to apply for Barclays Apple Card and got approved for $2.5k, then reconned right after for $4k. I took advantage of Apple's 24 month, 0 % financing. I've been hearing that Barclays is famous for Credit Limit Decreasing, so i'm wondering what I should do?
1) Pay off the card then cancel?
2) How do I prevent from being Credit limit decreasing?
3) Will I be decreased? (Ive been approved for Chase Freedom Unlimited, AMEX Plat Charge, Amex Plat Delta all in the same month)
Rule number 1; do not try to pre-anticipate AA. Even from Barclays
Rule number 2; even if ( if ) they CLD, you will still have the zero pct financing, still borrowed in those terms, so just pay it off during the term to avoid accrued interest.
@HeavenOhio wrote:It doesn't make sense. We've seen reports here of balance transfers being paid both too slowly and too quickly. I don't understand too quickly except possibly to raise the question of why the BT was done in the first place.
In the case of a deferred interest transaction, the only thing I'd worry about is paying enough to demonstrate that you intend to pay off the purchase. Dividing the total purchase into equal installments would accomplish that. I'd submit that if you wanted to pay faster, that's fine too.
And Barclays just might be hyper-sensitive to that.
Several times I have tansferred a balance from Capital One to FNBO (via a $0 transfer fee offer), and then a month later transfer the balance back to Capital One via a 0% offer, and they (nor FNBO) have never batted an eye. Although I do usually leave a token amount on FNBO and pay it down over a month or two at the 3.9% interest.
You can use it wherever Visa is accepted, but the special financing offer is only for purchases made at the Apple store or the Apple website.
@SBR249 wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@DaveInAZ wrote:Why would that be??? They make their $$$ on the BT fee, the longer you take to pay the BT the longer they don't make any money on the 0% interest.
Well, it's feasible that they MIGHT make money on bundling credit 'assets' to investors and include a pool of 0% BT that are more likely to not pay off in time. Investors might be willing to buy up a nice collateral class of debts where they miss out on 12 months of interest with an expectation of the person getting defrayed interest accruing when they don't PIF in time...
ABS (Asset-Backed Securities) frequently involve credit card debts, not mortgages.
Pardon my resurrecting an old post there but wouldn't Barclays and investors have some idea of the percentage of cardholders who PIF before incurring the deferred interest and the proportion that do not? Granted it's an estimate calculated from many factors but I would hope that it's not too wildly off base. I would imagine that the promised yields on ABS where such accounts are pooled would be calculated based on that estimate. In that case then whether or not Barclays takes AA for paying down balances too quickly is really not about whether a cardholder is paying down too quicking but rather what proportion of borrowers are doing so. As such your individual actions really have little to no effect on the outcome but rather it's basically luck of the draw as to the behavior of the overall pool of cardholders in that particular tranche of ABS that your account was bundled in. So the logical thing would be to just pay it down however you planned to and leave the rest to fate.
I assume its some sort of algorithm that makes the 0% offers to those they feel will generate more profit via a BT than via regular use.
In my case, when I was using the card regulary, I never got any BT offers. Once I stopped using it and let it set idle for 6 months, I suddenly got a 12 month 0% offer. They made more in the BT fee than they made in the previous 12 months of regular activity, so it was a net positive for them, even though I rode at 0% for 11 months.
For the record, when I first got my Barclay Rewards card years ago, it was before I became a member of this forum and saw how "sensitive" they were. I believe I opened up another 3 accounts that same month and two the following month, and I never had an AA from them. I also have carried high balances for several months, made large payments to PIF, had $0 balances for several months, done BT's, etc etc and have yet to get an AA from them (in fact, they auto CLI'd me a few months ago).
So, I totally agree that while there may be some trends that appear to be true when reading the forums here, I think they really do look deeper into a profile, and your history along with the history of others in your particular bucket are all taken into account on whether you're likely or not to be profitable for them.