Hi there all! I've been a long time reader of these forums and a beginner at all this. This place is such a great resource! This will be my first post and would love to gain your insights/expertise.

We are currently looking to collect 80,000 United Miles for a trip overseas. We currently have a Chase Freedom card (for about 2 years) and just got recently approved for the United MileagePlus Explorer card (50k sign up bonus). The next step is, we were going to look at opening up the Chase Sapphire Preferred in 3 months time (40k sign up bonus).

We have a great credit score, and also have a chase checking/savings account.

A few questions-

• Do you think we need to either lower the limit or close the Chase Freedom card so we can get the Chase Sapphire Preferred card approved in the next 3 months?
• How many months in between applications should we give between the United MileagePlus Explorer card and Chase Sapphire Preferred card?
• We would like to keep the Chase Freedom card as our permanent card and would like to close the United & Sapphire Preferred card before the annual fee comes up. Is this bad? I have read that when we open/close accounts this might put us at risk from being banned by Chase?
• Finally, to get the minimum spends to receive the bonus sign up points, we were planning on one occasion to pay our rent using our credit card via something like William Paid. Is this considered as something illegal by Chase?

Thanks in advance. If some of my questions have been answered, apologies and if you can please direct me to the post that would be great.