Originally Posted by
Marathon Man
I use Citi MC Gold and Plat for AA mileage earning. Having done the citi MC churn a lot of times for AA miles, I learned the following truths:
1) call to lower your limit on card (1). The reason is because Citi gives each user an allowance of available credit. Say mine is $10k. That would mean if a card has a $9,000 limit on it--and they often do when you have had it a while, you could only get a new card (2) with $1,000 limit on it.
Oh, if this is why you're lowering the limt, it's totally unnecessary. If they can only give you $1000 or $2000 limit on a new card, they'll offer you the chance (by phone and/or by letter) to move some limit from another card to the new card, right after the new card is approved.
Even though maybe I would like to eliminate that phone call, after comparing it to the trouble I had with consolidation (they kicked it up to another department, as I read elsewhere here they're required to do, but then got the details mixed up, so sent me a letter in snail mail that I needed to call before the consolidation could be done, and that letter took over a week to reach me), answering their call about whether you want to transfer limits is a comparative piece of cake.
Besides, how much are you going to spend on the new card? In my case, I'm going to spend at most only a bit over $750 the first month, so if it's an "unlimited spend" card and my credit limit isn't going to show up on my credit report (see the post by
Happy a few messages before this one), I might as well just leave it at $1000 or especially $2000 on the new card, right? (If it's an "unlimited spend" card, I presume I'm not going to have a problem with big authorizations just because my credit limit is low.)
(In my case, they've always been giving me $2000, not $1000. And some other posts here claim that's the lowest that Citi now gives, tho I guess it could very with the individual's credit history?)