As someone considering this with my 2 Capital One cards, is there any negative to this?
My Platinum, which graduated last year from Secured to Unsecured, is my oldest card. I also have a Quicksilver1 that has been open a little over a year but my limit is 3x as much as the Platinum. My Platinum is now up for an upgrade to a regular Quicksilver so what I wanted to do is upgrade that card to a Quicksilver and merge my Quicksilver1, which I would PIF beforehand, over to the oldest card and upgrade the card.
Should I upgrade my Platinum to Quicksilver first and then merge the two?
Or should I merge the two and then upgrade to Quicksilver?
I'm concerned if I merge the two, the offer to upgrade won't be available anymore. I'm also concerned if I upgrade first, I may have to wait to merge the two. Anyone with any experience or recommendations or what to do? Also is there a negative to merging cards?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
I did the same thing in a way. First, if you havent asked for a CLI in 6 months. Hit them up. Personally I took my QS1 and combined it to the regular Plat. Lost the $39 annual fee, kept the first cards age, and it closed the QS1 after the combine. Then go for the upgrade. It will still be a Plat with QS 1.5% cash back bene's. If you get some CLI luv. Then it have a larger CL. QS1's are hard to do much with. JMHO. YMMV. GL.
@FireMedic1 wrote:I did the same thing in a way. First, if you havent asked for a CLI in 6 months. Hit them up. Personally I took my QS1 and combined it to the regular Plat. Lost the $39 annual fee, kept the first cards age, and it closed the QS1 after the combine. Then go for the upgrade. It will still be a Plat with QS 1.5% cash back bene's. If you get some CLI luv. Then it have a larger CL. QS1's are hard to do much with. JMHO. YMMV. GL.
Thats what I'm leaning towards doing. I just PIF my QS1 few days ago and wanna close it out since it has the shortest age.
I would try the upgrade link to PC Platinum to QS. If you are up for a CLI (last one was 6 months ago), then also try to CLI the QS.
Keep your QS1 as paid off (unless your on steps).
Once you have the QS, then go for account combination and get rid of that AF.
Just did a merge to combine my QS1 that hasn't budged from its $1,750 CL for several years to my QS and now have a $10,100 limit on my only remaining Cap1 card. I had 4 at one time - 2 Platinum cards (old Household/Orchard ones taken over by Cap1) were converted to QS/QS1s several years ago.
@Anonymous wrote:Re negatives:
1) When you combine, you close 1 (or more) cards. As with closing any card, there is the slight negative that eventually the card will fall off your CR and you lose any AAoA credit for it. IMO, this is usually not worth worrying about, it will generally report for a long time, and your cards are likely to older then, so the drop off won't cause a huge impact. (Plus, several years from now, the whole scoring system could be very different, FICO 12-14 or something!)
2) Cap One has CLDd a few of us with large mainly unused CLs (whether from combining or not). So if you end up with a large CL (say > $30K but that's just a made up figure) and use a very small portion of it, you might experience this. But again, so far this seems rare.
For most, the benefits of having fewer cards to deal with will overcome these slight negatives
My QS1 is my shortest age length so having it closed, I don't expect it will hurt too much. My limits for my Cap 1s are the smallest of all my cards. It's really the reason why I want to combine them instead of having 2 small limits spread out over 2 cards, I'll at least have an "OK" limit on 1 card.
So update: I went ahead and upgraded my Platinum to Quicksilver. Same card, same APR but now it at least I get cash back (even though it's only 1.5%). Then I went ahead and combined my Quicksilver1 to the Platinum that was just updated to a Quicksilver. So instead of a Platinum and QS1, I now have 1 QS with no annual fee and cash back but with both limits combined. Thanks guys for your help.