Hello Everyone
I first discovered this thread back in February 2018 (a few months after discovering MMM and the FI movement). I had never opened a credit card before, and immediately realized between selling tradelines and all the cash back and travel rewards, I was missing out big time. So I immediately opened the Chase Freedom Unlimited and the Discover It cards.
Fast forward ~1.5 years to today. I didn't take advantage of credit card rewards as best as I could have - I didn't open another card til this past summer (Chase Sapphire Preferred - I just recently hit the $4000 mark for the 60,000 point bonus). However part of that was because I was leaving an old job at the time with nothing else lined up and being extremely conservative with my spending. I just got a new job, living in a new city, and can be more aggressive chasing rewards now (along with hopefully opening tradelines later on down the line as I have more cards open in the future).
So here's my situation:
Credit Score: According to credit Karma, between 750-755
Freedom Unlimited: 1.5 years, $11,600 limit
Discover It: 1.5 years, $11,000 limit (I literally never actually used this card until earlier today)
Sapphire Preferred: 3 months, $5,600 limit
Capital One Quicksilver: opened today, $8,000 limit
Income: $91,000 gross including bonuses
Primary financial goal: pay off student debt (approximately $77K at the moment)
Something I'm wondering: how on earth do people get such high credit limits? I saw the table on the first page - where cards with limits of over $50K get $300 per line or something like that. How do you even go about getting a limit that high? I just called Chase and Discover to try and increase my limits (the Discover call was funny - "Oh, you've never used your card... well we can check and see if we can raise your limit"). Discover wouldn't raise it; Chase raised my Freedom card by about $3K. Now that I'm done with the Preferred sign-on bonus, I could also transfer some of that limit to the Freedom card to get it over $15K. I'm curious, does my high student loan balance prevent me from significantly increasing my credit limits? I figured with my decent salary and credit score, I could get some bigger bumps than $3K, at least for Chase (not so surprised on the Discover card considering it had never been used).
Otherwise, I figure I can start using my Discover and Freedom Unlimited cards to sell tradelines. I know it wouldn't be much, but even an extra 200-300 every 2-3 months would get me that much closer to paying off my debt. Also, I opened the quicksilver as my new "everyday" cash back card so I wouldn't be worried about my Chase card getting closed in a worst case scenario. I also plan on opening more cards from here on out as I meet the sign-on bonuses (of course, this is all within the realms of my planned spending - I won't be buying things just to get CC bonuses).
Any "flaws" in my plan moving forward? Is there any reason for me to wait until I have higher limits/older accounts? Also, any thoughts/comments on cc limits are welcome. Otherwise, I'll be pm'ing arebelspy later for more info on tradeline companies.