How many Credit Cards does the average MF member have?

[coldfusion]

---

@wasCB14 wrote:

For those with several dozen cards...

I can see the value of autopay, but do you do anything special to be quickly alerted to unauthorized use of a card (as in a professional criminal getting your card info, not a friend or relative "borrowing" the card)? Not every lender offers useful (or timely) alerts, and a lot of people can pay little attention to them over time if the alerts are just about normal activity.

Rightly or wrongly, I feel I'd have a better chance in a dispute if I'm contacting the bank within hours, rather than weeks after a fraud.

---

I enable notification-of-use options whenever a card supports it.  That covers a sizable percentage of my cards.

I also have a pattern where I eyeball my accounts fairly regularly.  That isn't as onerous as it may at first seem as there are multiple issuers with which I have multiple cards and I stagger my checks. 

[wasCB14]

---

@coldfusion wrote:

---

@wasCB14 wrote:

For those with several dozen cards...

I can see the value of autopay, but do you do anything special to be quickly alerted to unauthorized use of a card (as in a professional criminal getting your card info, not a friend or relative "borrowing" the card)? Not every lender offers useful (or timely) alerts, and a lot of people can pay little attention to them over time if the alerts are just about normal activity.

Rightly or wrongly, I feel I'd have a better chance in a dispute if I'm contacting the bank within hours, rather than weeks after a fraud.

---

I enable notification-of-use options whenever a card supports it.  That covers a sizable percentage of my cards.

I also have a pattern where I eyeball my accounts fairly regularly.  That isn't as onerous as it may at first seem as there are multiple issuers with which I have multiple cards and I stagger my checks. 

---

I also like to "cluster" cards with a few issuers...6 Amex, 5 Chase. Right now 17 cards (I've already been counted in this thread) across 7 issuers feels like a lot.

Of course, there was a time when 7-9 cards across 4 issuers seemed like maximum complexity, so I guess one can get accustomed to a lot.

[Gmood1]

@wasCB14 

Yes, I have alerts set on most of my cards. I also scan through them from time to time. Looking for anything out of the ordinary.

[Anonymous]

Update:

Up to Message #73

Member # = 38

Total Cards = 612

myFICO avg = 16.11 Cards per myFICO Member

[Anonymous]

---

@wasCB14 wrote:

For those with several dozen cards...

I can see the value of autopay, but do you do anything special to be quickly alerted to unauthorized use of a card (as in a professional criminal getting your card info, not a friend or relative "borrowing" the card)? Not every lender offers useful (or timely) alerts, and a lot of people can pay little attention to them over time if the alerts are just about normal activity.

Rightly or wrongly, I feel I'd have a better chance in a dispute if I'm contacting the bank within hours, rather than weeks after a fraud.

---

Yep. I have every card that has notifications set to notify me when a transaction occurs. The only card I can't do this with is my PayPal Cashback but I check the PayPal app a few times a month for anything suspicious there. 

[Anonymous]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

Update:

Up to Message #73

Member # = 38

Total Cards = 612

myFICO avg = 16.11 Cards per myFICO Member

---

WOW those heavy hitters really boosted that average 😂 

[NoMoreE46]

So wishing this thread could have been permitted in a Kudo applicable section...

[wasCB14]

How concentrated is your spend?

I haven't run my 2019 numbers, but my 2018 numbers had a Gini coefficient of 0.605...so about as equally distributed as income in Haiti (not very equal).

[VanderSnoot]

@wasCB14 that actually made me smile. It's been a while since I dealt with Gini coefficients.

Ta