I apologize in advance for this long post. Iâ??ll try to keep it as brief as possible. Iâ??d like to get the above- mentioned card. I donâ??t have a debt problem, nor am I carrying any balances. I have always paid my balances off early. I have no current outstanding loans. I own my home outright â?? I took out a 30 yr. mortgage and paid it off completely in 15 years with no missed or late payments. I have never declared bankruptcy. In Nov. 2009 I applied for the Capital One card and was turned down. Reasons given: 1) income insufficient for amount of credit requested (I didnâ??t request any given amount of credit) 2) too many revolving accounts 3) revolving account balances are too low 4) new account balances are too low. Itâ??s true that I have a lot of credit cards â?? 15 in all, which I realize is way too many. I want to reduce that number greatly. I also have a couple of lines of credit and 2 charge accounts at department stores. Iâ??ve never used them. In total, I could POTENTIALLY rack up over $90,000 in debt if I worked at it. I have a low income, so I realize that I could never support a debt load like that. So my question is, how do I make myself attractive to Capital One for their cash rewards card? Do they see the potential for my getting deeply into debt the biggest problem? Or is the fact that I never carry a balance the issue? I can understand that if theyâ??re giving someone cash back on purchases, would they want them to always carry a balance so they can make their money back on the interest? I hesitate to just start closing accounts. Things that Iâ??ve heard reflect badly on your credit report are closing a lot of accounts quickly, closing older established accounts, or asking to have your credit limits lowered. Iâ??m tired of all the points and mileage rewards cards and want to make the Capital One card my â??go toâ? card for everything. I just donâ??t want to apply again and not get approved and have to wait another six months before applying again. Thanks for reading.
Insufficient income was most likely the major reason for the turn down in my opinion. Also, in my opinion Capital One is probably at the top of any list of the nation's worst credit card companies. I'd worry much more about staying with the cards that have given you the lowest interest rates with the least nonsense surcharges but not close any of them. What you probably don't understand is the terrible shape our economy is in now and how much worse it is likely to become in the near future. On the surface things look fairly good right now to the average observer. There seems to be plenty of available money, prices are relatively stable and may remain so for a short while more, the rate of new hires is increasing while new jobless claims are holding fairly study or even decreasing a bit and it also appears that credit may be loosening up a wee bit. Total credit card debt is decreasing which is good for the people but bad for the banks and the stores. But that's just the visible tip of the iceberg. What we as average citizens don't see is how much of the iceberg is below the surface of the ocean of debt our nation owes and whose economy is really booming. The only economies that are booming these days are the Chinese, the Brazilian and a couple of other countries normally thought of as 3rd world countries. The best advice is forget Capital One, Forget about new consumer credit, build up your savings to the greatest extent possible and don't keep in all in any one bank. Don't worry about closing your already too many credit cards. That will most likely happen automatically. Worry about how much money you can save instead and you will be a whole lot better off.
What's your FICO score? The Capital One No Hassle Cash Rewards Card is targeted for consumers with fair credit, which means you'll need to be in the 650-699 range. Based upon what you told us, I think your profile looks quite risky to credit issuers due to the amount of unused cards you've collected and low income. Those are the first 2 reasons Cap One gave you, and it makes complete sense as to why they're an issue. If you already have a ton of cards you never use and a low income, why would they want to give you another one? Leave the oldest accounts open and the ones with the largest credit limits and best terms, and then gradually close some of the accounts you never use. It sounds like you don't need 90K in available credit anyway. Keep enough available credit to peg your credit utilization under 10%. I do have to respectfully disagree with Bill - don't forget about consumer credit completely. It should be taken into consideration as part of your complete financial plan, which as he said, should also include building savings (a 6-12 month emergency fund). Most consumers who ignore their personal credit, end up regretting it at some point down the road.
Thanks Bill and Joshua for taking the time to respond. I'll find out my FICO score and start closing some of my unused accounts
I don't think we disagree all that much. Yes, I too think that personal credit is quite important but for those who have insufficient income and too much debt there isn't a lot of use even worrying about it. The first hurdle is getting that income up to a more respectful level if you possibly can. For the younger folks that might not be all that difficult but if you haven't enough education in a proper field or are too old then there is little chance of increasing income in most cases. >br/> For instance, when I bought the car that got repossessed I had a provable personal income of about $2K so I could qualify for the car. Then my provable personal income dropped to less than half that. That puts me at a level that I couldn't buy a hobby horse on credit. At my age I could never rebuild my provable income back to the $2K level so no matter what my score might become in say 5 to 7 years from now I'll never have enough income to qualify for any credit cards or loans. So why should I care what my credit scores are? But yes, just because my personal credit is tanked does not mean that I don't have credit. It also does not mean that I live in abject poverty. The deep freeze is full of food, the Fridge is full of food, the kitchen shelves are all loaded to the max, I have a car and two trucks and we just don't have any really big problems. We have 5 air conditioners so we aren't suffering from the heat. In fact, I figure we are really living fairly high on the hog. (LOL). And of course that don't mean we don't want more. Seems like no matter what we have we are never really satisfied. Always trying to get more and more. I've got a fairly big house and I'm having trouble trying to figure out where to put all the stuff. I've always wanted to get a business card scanner but I wasn't about to spend the kind of money they want for those things just to keep track of an occasional business card. My War Department wanted to go browsing through some good will stores yesterday just to get out of the house. We went to one and they had a brand new business card scanner still in the box. Everything was there. The CD, all the cords, it hadn't even been totally unwrapped. Price on it was $7.00 so I bought it, brought it home and it works like a brand new one should. That led to the next problem. Where to put it. So I had to put an extra shelf on top of one of my desks. Half a sheet of 3/4 in. plywood, 10 hanger bolts, a 2 x 2 eight feet long cost more than the danged scanner but at least i got more room to pile crap on now. (LOL) Really didn't cost me anything because I already had all that material on hand just sitting out in the workshop taking up space too. (LOL)
I don't think that's such a great idea either. Closing old accounts that you aren't using but have a low balance or no balance and which have a long history of good ontime payments will really kill your score. If they are new acconts with no real history then it won't hurt much to close them. Store cards are good candidates for closure too if you owe nothing on them. Closing store cards such as Wal-Mart or Target won't hurt much unless they also have a long history of on time payments.
