@Anonymous wrote:
@wasCB14 wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:Actually, the rules for gardening are rather quite simple: https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Personal-Finance/Garden-Club-March-2019/td-p/5521204
"What is gardening? Quite simply, it involves refraining from applying for new credit or seeking CLIs that require hard pulls. Soft pull CLIs, however, are not only acceptable, but are encouraged. The idea is to allow one's current trade lines to grow and mature, waiting for inquiries to age or fall off, and possibly waiting for "baddies" to be removed/age off. During this time, one tends to one's current accounts and watches their AAoA (average age of accounts) grow and the new credit ding fade."
I think Amex still does HPs on business cards, but if they didn't, it might present a quandary:
Would it still be gardening if you got a card with no HP that didn't report personally (so long as it was paid as agreed)?
I could ask in the garden thread, but I'd be too lazy to search for the relatively few replies amongst all the unrelated posts.
When I acquired the Amex Blue Business Plus in November 2018 it was a soft pull since I am an existing Amex member. As far as I can tell, new Amex cards are usually a soft pull for existing members and its unusual when a hard pull occurs for either personal or business cards.
I suppose its still gardening to open a business card IF it doesn't involve an inquiry and IF it doesn't report to the credit bureaus; so the new tradeline wouldn't appear on credit reports nor would it alter the Average Age of Accounts or the Age of Youngest Account.
Maybe, speaking from a historical perspective to be fair we really didn't cover business accounts when we redid the gardening guidelines several years ago (like 5 IIRC).
People chasing business cards through claiming SP status or even a EIN with some other built entity (Wyoming LLC or whatever is cheapest) to chase bonuses wasn't really a thing anywhere at that time... probably because the signup bonuses and rewards for business cards were basically nowhere compared to where they are today.
If I still had a voice in it I'd probably say all business card acquisitions simply resets your garden date because it's too messy to cover the edge cases. The fact is it's still the same goal if chasing SUB's and that should reset, and if you're establishing a real business and therefore need to build business credit, that's an absolutely legit reason anyway to build credit much like getting a mortgage.
The whole point of gardening was really to stop the frivolous applications that rationally nobody needs and yet are still seen here on a regular basis... it was absolutely expected that people would leverage their credit reports for responsible use of credit.
I do wonder looking back whether we might've changed that up some for things but it would've made it hard to manage and so a simple rule was needed and I personally think business cards should fall under the same bit even if they don't always HP on a PG, nor do some of them report to personal credit so I'd probably just change it up to "any activity that potentially leads to a new tradeline on personal or business reports" as resetting date.
