"After a few months, the next step was to apply to the credit cards that give generous bonus a la Busdriver! By the way, Pizzagirl, with the amount of travel you do, some of those perks are pretty darn good, and the annual fees are paying for themselves via access to lounges and other upgrades. "
Oh, I get miles for using credit cards - as well as the miles themselves that I get from actual flights. I just mean - I’m not interested in changing / canceling all the time.
“Oh, I get miles for using credit cards - as well as the miles themselves that I get from actual flights. I just mean - I’m not interested in changing / canceling all the time.”
For some people, it may not be worth the hassle of cancelling/applying, to get the bonuses. However, it really is a matter of a few minutes to sign up, a few minutes to cancel, and changing out credit cards in your wallet. The more recent signup bonuses I’ve gotten—$1,000 in REI gift cards (husband loved that one), $700 cash, $600 cash. I really like the cash getting deposited into my account, just for spending 5K on their credit card in three months. A week after the cash is deposited, cancel. A year later, do it again. We have gotten several thousand dollars for these bonuses. A bit of an irritation, but it’s really nice to get a mega bonus of cash, gift cards, or miles, just for getting a new card. As I tell my kids (and this will not get me on the parent of the year list)–If someone is going to get paid for doing nothing, it might as well be me…just passing on my terrible work ethic!
To me, I’d rather keep my credit “frozen” - that’s a better personal benefit to me than getting the gift cards / cash.
A banker once explained to me how being very credit-worthy can actually be reflected in a less-than-perfect credit score. When we getting a mortgage for our first home, I found out my credit score was in the high 700s. I was confused – I carried $0 debt (never had any debt ever), always paid my credit card bill in full each month, had few cards, paid all bills on time, etc. Assumed I’d have a perfect score. Banker explained that 2 things can actually reduce your credit score – not “carrying enough debt” (the FICO formula likes to see that you’ve had registered debt and paid it off in a timely fashion, so never having debt hurts you here…the formula assumes that you don’t have debt because you’ve never been approved for it – not that you’ve never sought it), and having a “high utilization” rate, as someone mentioned upthread. Basically, I had previously called and asked for my credit card limits to be reduced out of a concern for identity theft, which meant that I was using a higher % of my ‘available credit’ than the formula likes (basically, if my 2 credit cards came with default $20k credit limits each, but I asked them to be limited to $5k each, and then I spent $2k a month on the cards - this is just a made-up example - the formula flagged that I was spending almost 50% of my available credit, when if I had just left the $20k limits, it would be 10% and not an issue).
Anyways, also learned (I think this is still true – someone correct me if I am wrong) at the time that for the sake of a mortgage, for example, having a 780 credit score gets you the same “benefits” if you will as having an 830…so I didn’t do anything differently about it. Don’t know what it is now!
@3kids304 - The formulas are proprietary, which sucks because they affect our real lives but we don’t know what goes into them. But yes, it seems that they want you to have credit – but not too much – and use it – but not too much. What constitutes “not too much” is a deep dark secret.
I have only had one credit card in my life, and I’ve had it for 30+ years. Each month I charge a couple of hundred dollars on it, and then pay it off. The only other debt is the mortgage, which has zero late payments in 14 years, and each month an extra $300 toward principal. The FICO score seems to really like that combination.
Once you get into the upper 700s, pushing it to the 800s is hard, and involves guesswork about exactly what they’re looking for. But I think upper 700s will get you the best terms pretty much anyplace, so it doesn’t matter much. 780 tells a lender that you know how to manage credit, and that’s all they care about.
Hmm… the latest credit scores are now out of 900. I was kind of startled by that when I applied for a car loan last week!
We purchased a car last week. The dealer said I had the highest credit score he ever saw. He said most people had pretty poor credit.
Are car dealers trustworthy? 
There are credit scores from Vantage, which range from 501 to 990. The more commonly used (by lenders) credit scores come from FICO, which range from 300 to 850. There is a newer version of the credit scores from Vantage, which are rescaled to the 300 to 850 range. There are also a few other companies selling credit scores, also with potentially confusing overlapping score ranges.
See http://www.credit.com/credit-scores/what-is-a-good-credit-score/ .
What brand of car? Some brands have historically advertised to poor-credit buyers, and still attract a primary customer base that has low credit scores.