I’m not very aggressive signing up for new credit cards. Not because of the hardship in meeting minimum spend requirements, rather because it gets a little uncomfortable trying to explain to CSRs why you have 16 new credit cards within the past year. It’s usually not the biggest deal to live with this, but I prefer just limiting myself.
That said, banks definitely get their share from me. Maybe 10 cards/applications per year.
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Card Choices
Now was time for another couple applications. The ThankYou Premier with a 50,000-point bonus and the Blue Cash Preferred with a $200 bonus are both higher/better than the usual offers.
ThankYou Premier
With regards to the ThankYou, we don’t know if that offer will be around for long or if it’s temporary. I really don’t want to have to deal with the old split-year bonus and this offer was ripe for the taking. I held off for the past few weeks, waiting for all my retention bonus points to come in. This way, in case there was a need to close out one card in order to open another, no points will be lost on the deal. Really, that’s more of a Chase thing than a Citi thing, but I decided to wait for it anyhow. Since the points just posted it was time to apply.
Blue Cash Preferred
As for the Blue Cash, there are occasionally targeted offers of a better $250 signup bonus. My thinking is, however, that the card has ongoing value due to the 6% grocery category. If the bonus is $50 less than its peak, it may still be worthwhile to get it sooner rather than later so as to get in the $6,000 of spend during the 2015 calendar year.
Amex Platinum
The Amex Business Platinum with 150,000-point bonus was also on the table for consideration. The fact that the hard pulls of the Blue Cash and the Platinum would likely be combined made it especially appealing. For a couple of reasons, I ended up holding off on this one and just applied for the ThankYou and Blue Cash.
The Application
First, I applied for the ThankYou. Why? Because existing Amex cardholders probably won’t get a hard pull on their credit if they get denied. Rather have a cleaner report for Citi and not worry as much about the Amex application.
ThankYou Premier application
Applied for the ThankYou Premier card.
Result: Pending. Shoot. Instant approvals are so much fun.
Luckily, I’ve applied for Citi cards before and I recall getting the exact same result on a different Citi application which really just needed me to call in to decide on some credit line issues. Not a question of approval itself. The wording of the Citi response, “we need additional information from you”, sounded that way as well. Okay, that’s better.
The call into Citi turned out to be just that: they approved me for a $3,000 credit line and asked if they should move over $1300 from a different Citi card to bring the credit line up to $4,300. Only $1,300 can be moved, not more they said.
My knee-jerk reaction was to move $1,300 from the $8,000 credit line on my Dividend card. On second thought, it occurred to me that the ThankYou Premier card is likely a one-year-and-over card, so why transfer credit from a fee-free Dividend card which will be around forever? I can manage the minimum spend with a $3,000 credit line. So we left it at the $3,000 credit line and that was that.
On to the Blue Cash…
Blue Cash application
After entering my info, the system again gave me a pending decision.
Previously, I’ve always been instantly approved by Amex so this one was more surprising. Whipped out my phone to call the reconsideration line and I see an email pop up in my inbox with “Your American Express Application was Approved!” in the subject line.
I’m honestly not sure why the system gave me a pending reply and then instantly approved me. Maybe this is typical with Amex, maybe not.
One thing I noticed is that there wasn’t a long pause after applying the way there is with most credit card application. You know, the long time staring at that circle going round-and-round waiting to see what whether you’ll be approved. It gave a very fast pending message. It’s possible that this all has to do with the fact that Amex initially just soft pulls and subsequently hard pulls, or maybe it’s unrelated.
In any case, it was nice not to have to call in. Now I just have to see if there’s a way to register my Amex card for Amex Offers before I get the actual card…Oh well, maybe I’ll just call and ask them to expedite the card.
So…if your application is ever pending, it may not really be pending.
Let us know your own experiences in the comments.
