Thanks for the data/report, 2ndCor!
Seems like there's two ways to go:
1) Run cards until the issuers get mad, then stop.
2) Run them until they get cancelled, being willing to burn them out to eke out an extra few sales.
Option one seems like the route you're taking, and it seems prudent--make some money off the cards, then stop sales on them and keep the cards. Win-win (even if a shame you can't keep selling indefinitely).
If you literally don't care about the card at all, and would be cancelling it anyways, option two makes sense. (E.g. I have a few Barclay's I got for the miles and would have cancelled for the $89 annual fee, but I sell lines on them and have kept them open. I would cancel, and would be fine if they closed them for me, not worried about the tiny credit ding.)
Even if each card is only good for a few hundred/few thousand in tradeline sales before stopping, better than nothing if they're just sitting in a drawer, especially if you have quite a few in that position.
Would you say what you did with tradeline sales to this point was worth it overall?
Yes, I would definitely say so. Tradeline sales represent about a 50 basis point reduction in my portfolio withdrawal rate (so from a 3% to a 2.5% WR, for example) over the past year and a half. While not strictly necessary in my case mathematically, as a new FIREee in February 2016, the extra income has helped ease me into FIRE.
Option two makes sense except for the potential of ending up on an issuer black list permanently. I know from other bank games in the past that these exist and are used by the banks. What I do not know is the chance that piggybacking would result in ending up on one of these lists. Ending up on an issuer black list isn't really even a problem; it's the loss of being able to get new cards with sign-on bonuses that might represent an economic loss. So if piggybacking a Barclay's card, as in your example, gains you $500 in sales but ends you up on a black list with Barclay's and you can't get the new Barclay's Aviator Card and lose out on a $500 bonus after $3000 in spend, you may just be treading water. The variables here are that $3000 in spend may be harder than adding a couple of AU's, but it's also non-taxable income as a bonus instead of AU sales.
I used to worry about the credit ding, but in the option two scenario I believe it would be marked "Closed by credit grantor", and there are a number of innocuous reasons for an account to be marked that way, and I doubt they would add commentary to your credit file to assert you were a piggybacker. And even if they did, I don't think other credit grantors would read it.
Another factor in my situation is that with my financial situation getting more secure and me getting more comfortable, I just really don't need the income and the hassle, even though as a gig overall it's obviously an excellent one. Call me spoiled rotten lazy, I guess.
I did not mention yet that I have other USBank cards that are aging, so after I add the one additional AU on each of the "in danger" cards, I'll transfer most of the CL from them to the aging cards and should therefore have some young cards with juicy limits that may get additional AU sales. This is a strategy that might work in general - burn and churn older cards down to newer ones over time.
@MasterStache, my USAA card was with Old Company at the time that I got the warning call from USAA, and most of the AU sales on it were with Old Company.
@Orin! and in general, I think the real issue is not the rate of AUs, it's the total AUs added to the card over the card's lifetime. As an example, my USAA card had a total of 13 AU's on it in the past ~18 months...definitely not typical usage. If I were the CC companies and I wanted to catch piggybackers, that's how I'd write the query - give me all the cards who have had more than, say, 5 or 10 unique AUs added over their lifetime.