Beat: went on Amazon and bought $1300 worth of GCs with my Chase Freedom late on 12/31. Transaction didn't post until 12:28 am on January 1. What should have been $130 in UR points is now only $13

I would call Chase, it can't hurt to ask if something could be done, especially if the transaction was started before midnight, worst thing that can happen is they say no can do..

Have been reading about all of the Serve accounts that were shutdown today. Anyone know if having a shutdown would ding a credit report, or do prepaid products not interract w/ the credit bureaus?

No effect, they don't show up on credit reports

:thumbup:

Thinking bout buying a used car in the next week or so. Credit score 805ish, just opened a new Chase Sapphire card less than a month ago as well as a Chase checking/savings combo. Bout 60K worth of credit and have 6K in balances on 3 of 4 cards that I will be paying off in the next few weeks.

My last car loan that I paid off 5 years ago was thru Chase and I'm reading I should get pre approved for a loan before I try to make a deal with a dealer. Car I'm looking at is at a VW dealership and certified pre owned. Also thinking I may want to buy a condo or house at the end of this year/beginning of next.

Wondering what the best way of going about this is? Should I wait a couple weeks and pay off the credit cards before trying to get pre approved for an auto loan? Go thru Chase again? Looks like their rate right now is something like 2.49% and they would knock off .5% if I hold a Chase checking and setup auto payments. How will this affect me in a year if I want to try and get a mortgage?

I imagine Chase offers competitive mortgage rates and will offer a similar discount for having auto pay with one of their checking accounts. Congrats on the good work.

I had a VW Jetta for 3 years. Was a fantastic car for the price. It was a lease with a meh buyout price otherwise I would have kept it for a long time. Keep us posted if you end up in a 2016 over the CPO.

Car I was interested in got sold right before I arrived at the dealership today. I will take that as a sign. Can't afford a 2016 GLI unfortunately.

Toyota does 1.9% on certified preowned for 60 months. Several credit unions i have seen 1.99 up to 72 months on used from 2013 or newer

I've been playing around with a credit simulator that is available to me from one of my card providers, and I was surprised to learn that a balance transfer would have a non-negligible positive effect on my credit score. Is that simply due to the low/no interest on the amount transferred?

Is it possible to play a shell game with balance transfers to reduce/eliminate the interest on most (or all) of your balances?

For example, if I have 3 cards, all with balance transfer offers:

Card 1 Credit limit $10000, balance $4000
Card 2 Credit limit $2000, balance $1000
Card 3 Credit limit $2000, balance $750

Transfer total balance from cards 2 & 3 to card 1, then fill up cards 2 and 3 with the original $4000 from card 1?

There is only one reason I can think of that BT would help your score, and that's if you moved say 4k balance from a card with a 5k limit to a card with a 10k limit or similar, reducing your utilization.

Otherwise of course your card providers are going to want you to take balance transfers, they get a 3% fee instantly, plus they get more of your debt in their portfolio to manage. And I'm sure that balances on 0% cards tend to get overlooked by their owners as "why pay that right now... it's 0%". Of course that's true until it isn't 0%, and in the meantime you've racked up more debt.

The scenario you describe is only worthwhile if it's going to take you a long time to pay the debts down. Otherwise, you're paying 3% and moving $8k, so you're paying $240 instantly for the privilege of having interest not accrue for x months. Additionally, your scenario is bad - you don't want to have cards "filled up" as it murders your local utilization and you look like a high risk client to those banks.

I'm confused by these two points.

In the first paragraph, I have $4k in debt across two cards with $15k total credit limit. Does it really matter whether I have the whole $4k on the lower limit card, $2k on each card, or the whole $4k on the higher limit card? My overall utilization is the same.

In the second paragraph, you mention "local utilization". I've never seen this term mentioned anywhere else. Is that a thing?

As for whether a balance transfer is worthwhile to begin with, I asked a lot of questions from the CC card company about the transfer, and it seemed to me to make sense for my situation. I asked how payments are applied and they said any amount up to the minimum payment gets applied to the transferred balance, with any amount over the minimum getting applied to my main balance. My new minimum payment over the term of the 0% APR period would basically clear out the amount of the transfer. Any remaining amount of the transfer would then be subject to to my regular APR, but that is slightly lower than the APR from the cards I am transferring the balance from. Finally, the amount of the transfer fee is lower than the total of the monthly interest I would have accrued over the period of the 0% APR.

That all seems to make it a good idea for me to do it. Am I missing something?

You want to keep total utilization down, but my experience has been that it's also not great to be using a high % or your entire credit line on a single card, which is what I mean by "local utilization". I may have made that term up.

If you've done your research on the BT rules and you think it's good for your situation then go for it. Using your CC company for your research though is probably not the best, as they certainly have an incentive to get you to use it.

The two main things with considering a BT are:
1) Do not treat it as free period to not pay down the debt and/or take on more debt because you can suddenly "afford to"
2) Make sure that the 3% up front fee is less than the total interest you'd pay while paying down the balance on your own

If you have considered these points and have the discipline to pay down your debt without acquiring more debt then it can be a fine option.

1) any payment I make on my card up to the minimum monthly payment is automatically applied to the transfer balance. I couldn't choose not to pay it if I wanted to. Any amount I pay over the minimum is applied to my main balance.
2) yes, I did the calculations and confirmed that this is the case.

Thanks for the help! This thread is really great for those of us who are not experts at this stuff.

Thanks for the feedback.

What I mean with #1 is sometimes when you're under a hefty APR with a big balance you change your habits to avoid spending more and pay off the balance as quickly as you can. Maybe that means you stop eating out, or you start making more than minimum payments etc.

When you transfer the balance and it's now 0%, you might lighten up because the APR isn't crushing you. It seems less urgent to pay off. And maybe you start spending again, or maybe you only make the minimum payments bc you're no longer being penalized by the APR.

So the best thing to do is determine now, before you take the BT offer, what amount you should be paying off each statement, have it preferably be more than the minimum, and commit to that.

Gotcha!

To JL's point, FICO scores account for utilization of individual cards as well as overall. If you have a 3k balance and two cards, one with a 5k limit and other with a 10k, the balance being on the 10k card as opposed to the 5k card will make a difference. 5 or 10 points, in my experience. I try not to let more than 30% of a card report a balance, and certainly no more than 50%. My suggestion would be to leverage your interest in a balance transfer offer such that they raise your limit enough that the balance transfer will be less than 50% of the limit, citing concern for your credit scores.

This has been my experience as well although I haven't found it written anywhere. That's why I used the term 'local utilization'. I've seen my score drop 10 points in a month where I used 8k of a 10k limit on one card, even though i have a significant total credit available.

So at the very least it may make the specific lender nervous, and it may affect your credit score as well - even though it shouldn't based on the way "credit utilization" is typically defined.

Amex denies my CC applications because I still have a fairly low score (didn't do CCs in college for fear of getting in debt). They're sending me ads for prepaid debit though. Would it be useful to open the debit account with them to establish a relationship, or is that completely useless, and should I just wait until I have a good enough score for their CC? I have about $15k in credit through other companies, so I'm not desperate.

Opening a debit product with them won't have any bearing on how they view your creditworthiness.

The easiest Amex to get are the green and gold charge cards. The best strategy is to app one of those first (the PRG often has a juicy bonus and waived annual fee for the first year,) and follow it up the same day with an app for a revolver if successful, because the hard pulls will likely be combined. If denied for the revolver, try again in 6 months or so. The established relationship with the charge card will likely tip the scales in your favor with their internal metrics.

HSBC bank just notified me that they sent personal info to a third party (name/address/SSN) in error. Third party recognized the inappropriate data and sent it back. HSBC said ooops, sorry, and offered us ID protection.

I mention this because I haven't had any contact or affiliation with HSBC for roughly two years. Once they have info, you simply are never safe again.

Hong Kong Shanghai man... used to be the spot. Imagine if online poker / gaming existed before 1997.

Amex offers has a hulu offer spend $10 get $10. Any advices on how to take advantage of this? i have never used hulu but have access to the app on my tv so i would have to think that's an avenue eh??

with a similar promo in the past JL suggested loading the wallet(in this case Hulu) "x" amount of times with said Amex's. then the offer would trigger granting $10 back and I would have $60 or whatever in my Hulu wallet for the future, is this a possibility?

gonna go look now, lulz...

doesn't look like the have a "wallet" option as far as i see online, guess i can get some free movies and stuff for awhile eh?

ya, freerolling until the amex promo ends whatevs thanks amex

got a chase freedom offer for 150 bonus. last time i got an offer for 100 and i was holding out for the 200. take the 150 or wait for a 200?