I've obtained credit reports for all three of us to make sure I know all the accounts we have open, and I intend to close them all:
A Sears card we all three hold jointly
An American Express card I never use
A Discover card I never use
A Visa card AS never uses
And eventually, once I get all our rewards points and cash:
My Chase Sapphire
AS's Chase Sapphire
A Chase Visa that AS and I hold jointly
A Chase Visa that NT and I hold jointly
I found some cards I want to apply for. There aren't any more crazy $500 bonus cards available at present, but there are some pretty good rewards cards, and they're ones I wouldn't mind holding onto if I don't see better offers coming along soon after them:
American Express Blue Cash Preferred: Has a $75 annual fee, but offers 6% cash back on grocery purchases! So I'd easily earn more than that back. Plus you can get a $100 bonus for opening a card if you spend at least $500 in the first 60 days.
Citi Dividend Platinum Select MasterCard: No annual fee, $150 cash back if you spend $500 in the first three months, 1% rewards on regular purchases and 5% rewards on certain purchases (categories change).
Capital One No Hassle Cash Rewards MasterCard: 1% rewards on most purchases, 2% on groceries. Haven't found a good intro bonus, but this might be a good workaday one to replace my Chase Visa that I use all the time. Though the Citi one might do the trick.
I've already canceled my existing American Express and requested Discover cancel that account. I'm trying to cancel the Sears card but have been getting a busy signal for hours. Isn't that weird? Oh, and I realized Citi handles Sears cards, so it's making me wary of opening a Citi card, if they can't even staff their phones... (UPDATE: Just got an email from the facilities manager that our company's phones are having trouble dialing 800 numbers, so it isn't Citi's fault.)
I used Credit Karma to get an approximation of our credit scores, to see how much effect having old cards has. AS got an A on longevity of open accounts, while I got a C and NT got a D. Our credit scores?
AS: 781
CJ: 784
NT: 766
So as MonkeyMama said, doesn't seem to have much effect at all. We're all in the "Excellent" range and in the high 80s to low 90s percentile-wise.
Credit cards I'm considering
July 7th, 2011 at 06:04 pm
July 7th, 2011 at 06:19 pm 1310062745
Those are some nice rewards.
July 8th, 2011 at 02:20 pm 1310134805
I know that you, Monkey Mama and a whole lot of other people are into getting new credit cards, but I thought you'd like to read this article giving a totally polar opposite perspective. He brought up a few things I thought were worth noting.