@tiger99 wrote:
I'm looking into transferring a balance and opening a new card to help pay off some unexpected expenses over the past 18 months. I currently have ~$17,000 on a high interest Discover card getting my utilization pretty high at 70%. I have pretty good credit in the range of about 720 with each agency. I have a (I think) a fairly decent and stable salary. I have done research on some potential options for cards and have a few potential leads with 0% for 18 to 21 months. I guess my question is there any way to guesstimate if I will get a credit line high enough for the transfer or just transfer what I get? Would I be better off asking Discover for a lower rate? Any threads or links to discussions would be helpful. Thanks.
How successful you are in getting new card for BT purposes really depends on your overall profile.
Typically, you shouldn't wait till card is near maxed and balance is rather chunky.
If you have lots of other cards to where impact on your aggregate utilization isn't too bad and you have plenty of accounts reporting $0.00, you'll probably be approved for a card or two.
If you have thin profile, it's going to be very hard to not appear as risky customer.
So, before guess work starts, could you share a bit more about your own profile, such as your existing accounts, when where they opened, their balances, any negatives, any lenders that are out for whatever reason etc
To answer your second question about asking Discover for lower rate - you can do that but at $17,000.00 a few percentages less won't really help that much. Doesn't hurt to try but definitely not a solution to your problem.
