Most of the major credit card issuers let you check for pre-approval offers online. A lot of people don’t bother checking these, but I do think you should be doing this on a semi regular basis for some card issuers. I’ll go through each issuer and list what you should expect/be looking for.
- American Express. Sometimes they offer increased sign up bonuses, we haven’t seen this as much recently (especially with the incognito mode offers) but who knows when/if this will change. It might also help to trigger higher targeted bonuses in the future. Sometimes CardMatch also shows these increased bonuses.
- Bank of America. Sometimes they have increased offers available.
- Barclaycard. Pre-approval tool currently not working.
- Capital One. No need to regularly check.
- Chase. You either want to check for ‘selected offers for you‘ or check for in branch pre-approvals as both of these bypass the 5/24 rule.
- Citibank. They will sometimes show offers that don’t have the 24 month restrictive language. We talked about this recently here.
- Discover. Not worth checking.
- U.S. Bank. Not worth checking.
Let me know if I forget anything.
