For the last 2 ½ years I have been increasing the number of cards I have and the credit limits. However, in the last 3 months I have had no success, every request is denied. I have gone from 2 cards to 17 currently, 248k credit limit, good income, credit score over 800, and carry no balances.
Is there any recommendation on how to continue CLIs and new card requests?
Thanks in advance
There are two sorts of limits. One is sort of a speed limit in that the CC companies won't give you additional CL or additional cards at some sort of rate - for example, there's the famous Chase 5/2 rule, and many issuers will only consider CLIs every 6 months.
The other is sort of an absolute number limit, where the issuers will only give you X number of cards total or $Y in credit limits total. This latter limit is, I think, broken into two: each issuer will only give you a certain amount of credit, and all issuers collectively will only give you a total amount of credit across all issuers.
It sounds like you're bumping up against this latter limit, although some of your denials may be of the first kind if you're trying too often.
There are some things you can do:
1. Increase your stated household income. I'm fairly sure that a lot of what the issuers base their $Y decisions on is some multiple of your household income. And I think, from my experience, that that multiple is about 1/3-ish of your annual income per issuer, and about 3x-ish your annual income overall.
2. Increase your utilization. Issuers will give you higher limits on specific cards if you're using the card a lot. Like 1/2 of the credit limit each month for months on end. So you could push a lot of spending through a single card for a few months, then ask for a CLI on that card. Repeat with other cards.
3. Play issuers off each other. I think sometimes CC issuers get competitive with each other, so if you manage somehow to get a $20K line with AMEX, Chase will notice this and be more likely to give you a $20K line on your Chase card. Ratchet them up by playing them off each other.
4. Slow and small. Often CC issuers will give you a small CLI without much fuss. So if you ask for a $2K increase, that's hardly worth it for them to think about, analyze, and/or reject and annoy you their customer. So you can ask for $2K increases every six months, which is small on an individual level, but if you get it on, say, 10 out of 17 cards, that's a $20K increase in your overall totals.
5. Optimize your overall portfolio. If you have CC's with moderate limits that for whatever reason you're not using, they are taking up your $Y limit to no benefit. Cancel that $10K limit Sears card, and maybe CapOne will give you $10K more on your CapOne card where you can get more in piggybacking commissions.
6. Very rarely, computerized CLI increase mechanisms are broken, and you can take advantage of this. I once had a $99K AMEX limit because of this. To take advantage of this, you just have to keep your eye out and probably monitor some sort of forum where people post notices about this. (In the $99K AMEX thing, that was a FatWallet thread. FatWallet has been defunct for a while. There could be a Reddit forum for this kind of thing, I don't know.)
HTH.
Topic: Selling Tradelines / Piggybacking Part II: $1000+/hr, 20-40k/yr. Side Gig (Read 2127007 times)
