Results from My Most Recent Round of Credit Card Applications
Yesterday, I said that I had applied for three different credit cards. I was instantly approved for the Barclays US Airways card, but I received pending decisions for the Citi Executive AAdvantage card and the Bank of America Alaska Airlines card.
I called reconsideration for both Citi and Bank of America. The Citi call was pretty straightforward: I had essentially exhausted the amount of credit Citi was willing to extend to me (I already have 4 open Citi cards), so they wanted me to transfer some amount of credit from an existing credit card to open this new card, which I was perfectly happy to do. Some of the numbers the phone rep was saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me (at one point, she said I had $x credit limit on one card, which meant I could transfer $x+2000 to the new card), but I was going to close one of the cards anyway so I just transferred over most of the credit limit to my new card.
For Bank of America, they had actually approved me instantly, but there was a fraud hold on my account. This meant that I had to go through a couple of identity verification questions with a phone rep before she was able to tell me that my application was already approved.
Reconsideration phone numbers from Flyertalk if you’re interested:
Citi – (800) 695-5171
Bank of America – (866) 811-4108 – this line connected me to someone who wanted to talk to me about existing credit cards, but she happily transferred me to someone who could resolve the fraud hold on my application
All in all, a successful churn. I’ve gotten all of these cards before, so this was a true churn and not just an app-orama. I need to spend $7500 on the Citi Exec AA for 75k bonus miles, I’ll get 40k US Airways miles after first purchase for an $89 annual fee, and I’ll get 30k Alaska miles for a $75 annual fee. The AA miles will be useful given that I just put some JAL F tickets on hold for a potential new year’s trip to Japan (again), the US miles will be useful as they put me over the edge for an F redemption to Asia, and the Alaska miles I’m vaguely stockpiling in case I feel like doing another trip in Emirates F.
but how to spend 75K in such a short time given that there is no more Vanilla Reolad? any diea?
Given that a 75k sign-up bonus is quite large, I’ll be content paying more than I normally would to manufacture spend. This means that the methods that I’ll be using would probably not make sense to do manufactured spend on an ongoing bonus; instead, they’ll only make sense to use to meet sign-up bonuses. I’ll post about this more in detail if I’m successful.
I have the aadvantage citi platinum card at the moment, can i apply for it again and get the bonus ? Or do i need to close it first and then reapply.
You sure can. No need to cancel before applying, but it does need to be over a year since your last AA approval, including the Citi Exec AA card.
You have 4 open executive citi cards?
Sorry if my post wasn’t clear, but I only have 1 open executive card. I have 4 open cards of all sorts from citi.
But how to spend $75K is three months if not a big spender?
The spend is $7500, not $75k (the latter would be quite ambitious for me). As I wrote before, I used some techniques that cost a little bit more than would make sense to do ongoing manufactured spend but are totally worth it to get the sign-up bonus.