Ahh, historically that hasn't been the case.

What are the 5 versions?

Glad you brought this up. I'll take you up on your referral offer if I do order from them. I was looking at some of their promo products, but unfortunately there's a max. (e.g.) I can't buy 5 cases of Smartwater.

Does the Amex promo stack for the whole period like buy $40 worth one day and $35 the next?

there are actually more than 5.

i have the regular version. auburn university, some other college i forget, vet association, and lawyer association versions.

nah, im sure u have to spend $75 on the order

Very excited to report my success to the thread. I must thank JL again for having the stroke of genius to create this thread, it really got me pointed in the right direction in a big way! I got my credit profile improved from a couple of minor derogatory accounts and a low 600 score in April '14, to 10+ positive accounts and scores around 735 as of this writing. Have made a ton of CC bonus and cash back money which I never knew about, and now I have achieved my initial goal of getting a great used car loan rate.

The aforementioned truck made it all the way to 238k+ miles. Still no check engine light. I was wrong about the timing belt though, the interval is 110k miles, so I was pushing it, haha! I was already a NASA FCU member from applying for a credit card with them last year, so I decided to apply for an auto loan last week. Their best rate is 2.99%, and I qualified for it! Actually they said I could have 2.49% if I went 36 months. I see some better rates around at other places for customers with DD or autopay, neither of which I wanted to mess with, so I did about as well as I could.

I wanted to keep my payment around $200, so I asked NASA for 12k. My thinking was to look for something to get out the door for 10k at 48 months, but if I fell in love with something a little more I could go 63 months. I wound up doing the latter as I got a decent deal on a 2012 Kia Sorento LX. I did allow the dealer to shop my credit but they wound up going with NASA anyway. That was fine by me because they finalized the loan and I wound up needing a little more for the GAP coverage. Payment is $220 but with any luck I can cancel the GAP after a year or so and knock it down to ~$206. Out the door at $12,835 and the loan will cost me $13,900 if I stick with it on schedule for 63 months. If I had never bothered rehabbing my credit, I shudder to think what the APR and the cost of the loan would have been.

Thanks again to everyone who helped steer me in the right direction early on! Happy to be in a position to help others now. Next personal goal will be to buy a house, right now I'm going to bask in the afterglow though :P

speaking of cars, anyone buying a car on credit?

i guess, its perhaps a frequent option to pay your autoloan by cc, eh? in need of one soon and i will definitely be making sure i can pay the loan with cc.

i guess another option though, is anyone going to a dealership and literally charging to a card?

Congrats mrage!

Supposedly, through Amex car buying service there are some dealers that will take full purchase on Amex. Of course none of my local dealers did, they let me put max of $2k on the card.

congrats mrage!

Any more specific advice on small derogatory accounts? I've heard pay for deletes are on the decline, so maybe ask and then just pay if not?

Thanks, all! Feels great. I've always paid cash for beaters (which is a fine way to go) but it's great to have something late model and well appointed.
It depends a lot on who owns the accounts. I can't profess to have done much magic with mine though, they were just fairly old and I got them off a little bit early.

Generally speaking, if you can get the original creditor to accept payment in full, you can get a collector to stop reporting. Doubly so in the case of a medically related bill, due to HIPPA. Some junk debt buyers (JDBs) are more stubborn about it though, so YMMV. The best resource I've found regarding credit cleanup resides at creditboards.com. There's plenty of junk to wade through and it's kind of a weird culture over there but there is quite a lot of good info to have. If I have a credit question I start by going to google and typing in site:creditboards.com to limit the search to their site, and invariably there is prior discussion on the topic I'm interested in researching.

2nd quarter in 2015 was restaurants for both.

If a dealer lets you put the full price of the car on a credit card, you're not getting a good deal on the car. You can use it as a technique to backdoor some extra savings though. Negotiate the price of the car down to the salesperson's minimum, then surprise them with "I want to put the downpayment on my credit card." They won't like it cause it will cut into their profit, but if that's the only thing stopping them from closing a deal they'll allow something like $2-5k.

Put an $8k car (+taxes, title & fees) on my BCP last year. It may depend on the dealership and new vs. used.

Similar thing right now with bouqs, a eco-friendly flower place. Amex offer of $15 off $50, plus 8-12% cashback from a portal + 15% welcome 1st time buyer discount (WELCOME15).

$60 worth of flowers (free delivery if you signup for an account instead of guest checkout) for $51 after welcome offer, $5 cashback, $15 off from amex.

Also a referral system. If a current member invites you, you get BOGO on your first order and the referrer gets $20. I'll post a pic of the flowers I get this afternoon to see if it's worth it. PM if you want a referral.

we need to eat homes, not smell flowers

Did boques thing for my grandma for Christmas. They shipped on the 23rd from California and were delivered to her in Indianapolis on the 24th. Crazy world we live in.

Never got a pic of the flowers since my grandma doesn't have a cell and I'm pretty sure all my cousins on that side are Mennonites that shun technology. She said they were beautiful though they did not come in a vase.

Update to this - turns out that I put this trip together so that it overlapped my best friend's wedding. Whoops. Luckily I realized that when all segments were still on hold.

I'm in the process of rebooking now as the schedule opens and we're having a bit more fun with it than the original US-ASIA-US routing. Instead we're doing a RTW with a few days stop in the city of love:

US-Madrid-Paris on Iberia Business Class
Paris-Doha-Bangkok on Qatar First Class

and then we'll make our way home, although I'm not sure of the routing yet. Toying with the idea of BKK-HKG-NRT on CX, and NRT-US on JAL, but not 100% sure at this time yet if it's worth tacking on segments at the end to try different carriers or not.

Luckily my fiancee is willing to fly whatever I plane and routing I put her on "as long as its got a flat bed and champagne"...

Of course the price of this trip will nearly double in mileage costs but with the pending AA devaluation might as well use them now anyway.

Yep the car buying service is one of the neat features I've read about as a Platinum cardholder. Generally lease / finance companies will not accept credit cards, and dealerships have a soft cap for using your cc. This probably depends on how much you're getting ripped off.

In reference to mrage's story, congrats, but coughing up your ssn to the dealership, so they can run your credit kinda rubs me the wrong way. You walked in with $12k plus whatever cash you were prepared to put down. That should satisfy them. Ugh, hate auto dealers.

With tomorrow being the last day for the Discover IT Apply Pay promo, I figured I would post what I ended up buying using this awesome deal.

From Best Buy with some price matching and sales:

65" Vizio - $900 (for me)
32" Sharp - $150 (for nephew)
PS4 Bundle - $300 (for nephew)
Two Dualshock 4 controllers - $80 (one for me, one for nephew)
iPad Air 2 64GB - $475 (for girlfriend)
Sennheiser HD558 Headphones - $80 (for me)
Cuisinart Pressure Cooker - $90 (for me)
KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer - $280 (for me)
5 PS4 games for ~$120 (for me)

Whole Foods:
Christmas Eve Prime Rib - $60

With tax that's about $2,700 and I'll be getting about $600 back.

This is definitely worth it BTW. After all discounts referrals and portals it was about $30 overnight shipped a huge bouquet of flowers to my gf's office. The only small downside is they're packed tightly in a box and take a bit to fully bloom after you trim and put them in a vase, so the initial presentation isn't great, but that's very logical given the process. She got them yesterday and they look/smell great now. Not the best pic, but



Will likely use them again in the future.

I figured out my daughter's daycare could be paid with Apple Pay, prepaid 10 weeks. Would have prepaid far more but not sure whether her momma is going to keep the job necessitating daycare and didn't want to obligate her to. All told, between that, $1450 of gift cards, a new iPhone, and grocery shopping, got almost to 5k. So we took them for about a grand. 6k in disallowed GC purchases though, ugh.

Capped out the BCP in the nick of time as well, save for about $300. Gearing up for a credit card app spree in mid January now that the car purchases is done, need to revisit my hit list because the bonuses I wanted to go after are mostly watered down now.

@mrage NICE - I didn't do the apple pay promo at all :/

@mullen - what bouqet is that one? Did it come pre-bloom or partially bloomed?

I believe it was called Loyal. They were all open, some bloomed, some partially bloomed. Just the way they are packed (tightly, with each flower having a plastic sleeve wrapped around the top) it took a bit for them to fully open up. That pic I posted was about 24 hours after delivery and 48 hours after ordering. Very vibrant colors.