Hello all! Finally signed up for an account, after years of on-again-off-again lurking. Over the last 18 months I've been getting my finances in order, paying down (nearly) all my outstanding debt and seeing my FICOs rise with time — and this forum has been a big help in understanding it all, so thank you.
I was a little impulsive with a couple app's last week, and didn't realize until later that I may have put myself in a delicate situation with my biggest lender. Now I'm wondering if y'all have any advice about how to get in the best possible position as things start to report.
To give you some background, my FICO8's from earlier this month are EQ 721 / EX 731 / TU 696, when I had 5 TLs reporting (plus a car loan that'll be paid off in five months):
- Two Cap1 QS's @ $1,750 and $850 (both started out as Platinum cards that I PC'ed last year) — opened Feb. and March 2017
- Discover IT Chrome @ $750 — opened Aug. 2019
- Chase Freedom Unlimited @ $500 — opened Aug. 2020
- PenFed Power Cash Rewards @ $3.5k — opened Aug. 2020
It started in late February, when I was shopping for a couple new pieces of furniture online at West Elm. Put the items in my shopping cart, then some message came up that was enough enticement to look into Comenity.
Got instant approval for $6k, which was my largest balance to date. I hadn't been sure I'd buy anything with or without the approval, but that starting limit meant I could be under 20% util and take advantage of their 12-month 0% APR financing, so I went for it and placed the order that night.
Fast-forward to last week. Like I said, I've paid down all but the last $250 of my debt (which is on the PCR) and have had $0-$30 balances reporting on all the other cards for several months now, so my scores have gone up quite a bit in the last year. I've been wanting the Chase Amazon Visa for awhile (so much of my monthly spend is at either Amazon or Whole Foods) so I decided to go ahead and apply. Approved, first with the $5k "introductory limit" showing onscreen, then ultimately saw $6.4k when I loaded up my online banking profile.
I was thrilled, because that was one of my bucket-list cards and finally got Chase beyond my $500 toy limit on the FU card — but I didn't think about the fact that Comenity hadn't reported yet. Definitely a mis-step on my part; I wish I'd have looked into that more beforehand.
Here's where I may have done something even dumber: fresh off the elation of bagging the Amazon Visa, I checked Amex's prequal site.
I had applied for a card of theirs last August, and it was my one rejection. I made some dumb decisions about credit 8+ years ago, and while I was fairly sure I'd never had an Amex account that could get caught up in that, I wasn't positive — so Amex was another white whale for me (particularly a solely Amex-branded card rather than an airline or hotel offering).
Anyway, I was prequalified for BCP and BCE, maybe some others. I figured, if I already did one HP that night, why not just one more to try and get in with Amex again? Especially given the $200 on $1,000 spending sign-up bonus?
I was approved for a BCE with a starting limit of $1.9k, and was really excited to have made so much progress with two top-tier lenders in one fell swoop.
A day or two later, I was browsing the forums here and started to realize how uncomfortable Chase can be with 'credit-seeking,' sometimes even if that's just one or two other concurrently-opened accounts. And that Comenity can get spooked in the same way, at least to an extent. Again, totally down to my inexperience, but I'm now checking my accounts several times a day out of worry that I'll get an AA — possibly even the closure of both Chase TL's.
I'm kind of fatalistic about what happens from here — if Chase is going to AA me, they're going to AA me; there's little I can do to intervene — and I'm lucky enough that I don't actually need any more credit than what I'd have if those two cards (plus even the Comenity) just disappeared. But I'd really like to keep these Chase accounts open, so I want to do whatever I can to increase the chances of that happening.
My first step toward that: the Comenity TL still hasn't reported, but out of concern I paid down about half of the balance so it will report as having less than 9% utilization.
Is there anything else I can do now? I could pay off the whole Comenity balance and even close the account once paid (possibly before it reports to the bureaus for the first time); I could decline to activate the Amex that just came today and send it back so it would never report (I think?); there may be something else I could do to increase my odds that I don't know about.
Let me know if it'd be helpful to provide any more details. Thanks again for all the advice that gets posted here — this is a specific situation (and one of my own making), but I hope my raising it can help someone down the road.
