@Anonymous wrote:Trying to Understand the Give Cards a Lot of Use to Set up for CLI AND do AZEO
Ok. I have the CC's I want for awhile. I might add one or 3 more relevant store cards in 3-4 months or something. Right now, I'm set.
I'm still in my first 12-24 months of rebuilding my credit. Which means I'm after two things simultaneously:
1. Getting to 675 all across then 700 all across soon/asap. (As soon as possible without that being a dire rush of 😱 omg I need that score right now. Just sooner nicer.)
2 Giving my cards (not OpenSky my starter buffer card which I'm now leaning towards keeping a bit longer to bolster my AAoA and enforce some savings) enough USE to garner CLI's and 3 conversions/graduations.
I'm less concerned for NFCU nRewards b/c my CL is $1500 and I have a monthly $1K thing always going through.
The Cards:
Discover It: Secured at $500. I want it to grad to $2-3K. I'm in the second month of having it and am settling into using it to a few hundred or more monthly.
TargetRED: I understand if you use it well, they are more likely to grant their CLI's.
My 2 Cap1's. Platinum Secured and small WM. I'm giving them a little use now, the secured used to get the $1K charge. Now to NFCU. I PIF. Pretty much always have. Do I need to put through a least a few hundred til it graduates so it DOES graduate 👩🏼🎓? No rewards on it, so very little incentive to do so beyond desiring graduation 🧑🏼🎓.
⚖️ ⚖️⚖️⚖️⚖️⚖️⚖️⚖️
AZEO Benefit:
I'm kindah doing this/aiming for this also so I keep my spending and credit use in check. Without declaring bankruptcy, I have bungled it two major times earlier in my life. So much so that I simply used debit cards 💳 only for years. (Yes, 10 years when I could have simply carried a small $300 CL Secured Card... 😭 I didn't know. Only found this forum in Jan/Feb)
I want the AZEO Benefit. But for Discover and Cap1 to graduate 👨🏾🎓, do I need to leave a wee $10, $25 balance on it when it cuts each month til graduation 👩🏻🎓, please?
Thoughts? Ruminations?
Thank you for assisting my re education. 🙏🏻
I think you're trying to do too many things at once.
I agree with @Kforce that you should not be using spend to try to impress your lenders so that they will give you a CLI. That is a very low percentage game.
IMHO you should be concentrating on using your cards as little as possible, and reporting balances as low as possible, with as many zero balances reporting as possible. Except letting at least one card report a small balance each month before you pay it off.
Well, all creditors will see the use of their respective cards, but if you do AZEO, they won't know how you use your other cards.
Trying to get Capital One to graduate will be difficult. They only recently started doing it again, and no one really knows how to best improve your odds. High usage may or may not help. Also, getting a CLI is near impossible on ANY Capital One "starter" card such as the secured or Platinum. They're usually bucketed and give little to no CLIs.
Discover won't give a CLI until the account is at least 1 year old.
AZEO is really for optimizing scores in preparation for an upcoming credit application. Doing it all the time can become tedious and frustrating. But of course, it's your prerogative if you choose to do so.
@Anonymous wrote:
@OmarGB9 wrote:Well, all creditors will see the use of their respective cards, but if you do AZEO, they won't know how you use your other cards.
Trying to get Capital One to graduate will be difficult. They only recently started doing it again, and no one really knows how to best improve your odds. High usage may or may not help. Also, getting a CLI is near impossible on ANY Capital One "starter" card such as the secured or Platinum. They're usually bucketed and give little to no CLIs.
Discover won't give a CLI until the account is at least 1 year old.
AZEO is really for optimizing scores in preparation for an upcoming credit application. Doing it all the time can become tedious and frustrating. But of course, it's your prerogative if you choose to do so.
Thank to each and all of you. @SouthJamaica @Kforce This really helped. @OmarGB9 you wrote that Discover doesn't give a CLI until 1 year. For some reason, I thought they considered graduation sooner than that and at graduation, with good behavior, they graduated to some decent maybe $2K CL.... yes, no, not really? Mythological 🦄 ?
During the past 5 years, Discover has been all over the place on CLI's. Nobody knows what their policy is at any given moment, and it's questionable whether they even have a policy.
The only patterns I can discern are: (a) 5-6 years ago they were giving out a lot of CLI's, but then they stopped, and (b) during the past year they have been tougher on CLI's.
But even in more generous times, no one could figure them out. Some thought the key was to use the card a lot; some thought the key was to not use the card; some thought the key was to use the card just a little. Some, like myself, thought Discover's CLI's were determined in a room full of monkeys with keyboards.
As to its policy on graduating secured cards, I have no experience in that area but the consensus seems to be that they are pretty reasonable about that.
@Anonymous wrote:
@OmarGB9 wrote:Well, all creditors will see the use of their respective cards, but if you do AZEO, they won't know how you use your other cards.
Trying to get Capital One to graduate will be difficult. They only recently started doing it again, and no one really knows how to best improve your odds. High usage may or may not help. Also, getting a CLI is near impossible on ANY Capital One "starter" card such as the secured or Platinum. They're usually bucketed and give little to no CLIs.
Discover won't give a CLI until the account is at least 1 year old.
AZEO is really for optimizing scores in preparation for an upcoming credit application. Doing it all the time can become tedious and frustrating. But of course, it's your prerogative if you choose to do so.
Thank to each and all of you. @SouthJamaica @Kforce This really helped. @OmarGB9 you wrote that Discover doesn't give a CLI until 1 year. For some reason, I thought they considered graduation sooner than that and at graduation, with good behavior, they graduated to some decent maybe $2K CL.... yes, no, not really? Mythological 🦄 ?
Graduation, yes, is considered starting at 7 months. Usually people get a CLI at graduation, but not always. And it's not always bumped up to $2k. I believe I recently saw someone get a Disco graduation and only get a $100 or $200 CLI from their initial $500 secured.
...........
Then again, praying in the direction of the monkeys that SouthJamaica mentioned might also work equally well.
I don't think so. I think the monkeys are agnostic.