App-o-Rama - Current Cards

As I prepare for my App-o-Rama, one of the first steps is to figure out what the credit card companies will see when they pull my credit history. This is important for a number of reasons:

• Credit Score

  If your credit is bad you are not going to get much in the way of new credit.
  I plan to sign up for one of the free trial offers so that I can measure the impact of the App-o-Rama on my credit score.

• Credit Utilization

  If you have maxed out your credit then new companies will be more cautious. You want to have as much ‘free’ credit available as possible so that once you withdraw the balance transfer money you will keep your total credit utilization under 50%. Right now my credit utilization runs about 3%.

I have put together a list of my credit cards from what is showing on my Credit Report. The next step in an App-o-Rama is usually to call and get your credit limits bumped up. This helps lower your overall credit utilization percentage and allows you to reallocate the credit limit from one of the old cards to a new BT card if they are from the same credit card company. With over 100k right now, I don’t see the reason and I don’t want to chance a hard credit pull. Once I do the 0% BTs I will call all the cards and request an increase since it then won’t matter if they do a hard credit pull.

Current Credit Cards

To Do

• Continue reading FatWallet App-o-Rama threads
• Choose a Credit Reporting Service Free Trial Offer
• Collect data for the new credit cards I plan to apply for in this App-o-Rama
• Create App-o-Rama Index Page page to document my strategy and its implementation.

Update:
I called for a credit increase on the Macy’s & Sears since they were my smallest credit limits.
Macy’s did bump up the limit $500 but Sears would not. We don’t really use the cards so that is probably the reason. Will be interesting to see what the declination letter from Sears says.