ztnjpv

I have been reading about the browser method and am getting conflicting information.

Some say to app for cards from different providers while others say the opposite depending on the bank.

What I haven't read is a clear cut sentence about apping for 2 AMEX cards at the same time.

Does this work? I wanted to do the SPG BIZ and one of the personal cards (Not SPG) at the same time.

Any experienced advice?

ddallas

It used to in the sense that both apps would be processed on the same day and the two inqs would be merged into one but lately (for me at least)they have been processing one app and holding the other one for like 5 days before releasing it to processing. So you tend to get two inqs.

sdsearch

What is your goal? The two-browser-type trick has up to three completely different purposes:

1. WIth Ciit AA (and no other bank and no other card that I know of), it's the trick to let you apply for two AA cards on the same day, instead of haivng to wait 2 years to get the second one.

2. With two "similar enough" cards from the same bank on the same day, it causes the credit bureau that receives two pulls to merge them into only one. (But "different enough" cards, even from the same bank, may not get merged. And cards from different banks never get merged. The merging is a "byproduct" of the bureaus trying to remove "duplicates" from your report, and they only remove them when they can't tell whether or not they might be duplicates. So if you apply for two "similar enough" cards that the bank sends the same pull information for both, they may get merged.)

As an example of "simialr enough": Two different Citi HHonors cards are "similar enough". Two difeferent Citi AA cards are "siomilar enough".

As an example of different enough; A Citi HHonors card may be "different enough" from a Citi AA card to show up different on a pull, and thus not get merged. (Ie, cards form the same bank but of totally different "affinities" may generate different-looking pulls that don't get merged.)

And a personal card and a business card (of otherwise the same card) are often "different enough" to generate different looking pulls and thus never get merged. (But I don't know specficially for SPG Amex.)

3. Wehn applying for two identical cards at the same time (hard to do with banks other than Citi AFAIK), using two browsers, or using two Private (aka InPrivate) sessions in the same browser, can keep the cookies from the two (otherwise identical or "too similar") apps from getting confused.

These are the only reasons to even consider a two-browser-type trick. There is no need to use two browsers if the cards are from different banks, as none of the reasons stated above can apply if the apps are from different banks.

ztnjpv

Thanks for the reply. But what you are saying is a 180 from the info here:
http://romsdeals.com/2012/12/05/mult...the-same-time/

and dissimilar from this:

http://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=8028.0

There are others. But the information always seems to differ.

wcj

I am not the voice of experience, but I've had the same result as the above posters. I even tried a conference call with four apps submitted on "go" so to be closer in time than different browsers, but I ended up with three pulls with the AA Visa and AA Amex merging.

ddallas

People have different experiences, things change over time, and lots of people just repeat what they read somewhere else.

I agree with what sdsearch posted above. That matches my experience.

sdsearch

I don't understand which part you think is different. Those sites never say that pulls are combined from apps on different banks. They just aren't that specific. That's why I went to the trouble of being that specific, because I'd that most write-ups didn't clarify that. For example the first site you link just generally says "it combines pulls", then shows that although he applied for 4 cards, it was only from 2 banks, and then only says how much his credit score changed, not how many pulls he actualy got.

Then the other site talks mainly about mutiple card aplications on the same day from the same bank. Which is what i was saying.

So please be more specific if you think some information that I wrote might be wrong. I wrote a lot of things in that post, and so just saying "some of it seems to contradict" to does help us help you figure out what the real story is.

The exact specifics matter a lot. So you have to pay attention to write-ups that are very specific, and less to write-ups that are vague and general.