Again, specifics matter greatly.

You can apply for at least one card (HHonors 50k) from Citi every month if you want (if you're not applying for much of anything else, that is) and get the bonus each time, because Citi generally doesn't approve you if they are not going to give you a bonus.

On the other hand, the churning rules for Citi AA cards are quite different, and are constantly changing, vary from one AA card to the next, and vary even from one offer link to the next. So you can read a post about someone who got two AA cards a month apart, and it may be true, but it may true only for a very particular (and potentially expensive) card and/or it may be true but the offer may gone by now.

You can apply for at least one card (AS 25k) from BofA at least every few months (maybe even more than one at a time). However, there you have to make sure you get approved for Visa Signature, because if you get approved for a lesser Visa you get a way tinier bonus (5k instead of 25k). But that has to do with credit and process, not a limit on churning.

At Barclay, if you have one US card, and you're lucky enough get an "instant approval" (by the computer), you can get another US card after a few months. But if for any reason you don't get an "instant" approval, and a human has to look at your application, you're bound to get denied. And whether you get instant approval or not is not tied to credit score (we haven't figured out what it is tied to). So in the US card thread, you'll get plenty of anecdotes about people who've gotten a 2nd US card while having the first one, but if you dig down, you'll see they all got "instantly approved"; then you'll see other people with denial reports, and you'll see that they didn't get "instantly" approved, and a human denied them.

If you study the threads for those cards (follow the links above), you can figure out the churning rules for each card/offer. But you have to take the time to figure it out for each card/offer.

On the other hand, you cannot apply for another personal Amex of the exact same type every again adn get the bonus:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...etime-usa.html

You can call up Amex and ask them which cards you've had before. It's not a red flag, because you can't apply for them anyway. Or you can switch to applying only for Amex business cards, which don't have that restriction (though they do have a timing restriction).

You can churn Chasse by the rules (24+ months) and have more reliable success, or you can try bending the rules and maybe you'll have success and maybe you'll fail miserably. How risk averse are you?


In general: I find it's not a problem if I follow the rules (that I learn about on FT) and add some "fudge factor" for safety. But I"m fairly risk averse. Some other people like to test the system; sometimes they get lucky, sometimes they don't. If you only focus on the posts that happened to lucky and ignore all the posts about people who failed, then you get a distorted perspective. There are always exception to the rule, but do you want to rely on being the exception?

But don't try to figure it out all at once. It can be a bit overwhelming. Identify a couple cards you'd like to repeat, and figure out the churning rules for those, and see if you can repeat them yet or if not when you can. If there's no repeatability there yet, go through the same process for another couple cards.

(Also, for each "currency", find out if there's more than one card with the same currency. For example, temporarily there are AA cards from both Citi and Barclay, because Barclay US cards will become AA cards. There are Hilton HHonors cards from both Citi and Amex, and two different ones at each bank. You can earn Marriott, United, and Southwest points/miles not just from their cards but from several different Ultimate Rewards cards from Chase. And so on.)

Anyway, back to your original question as posed: I've never yet had to ask a bank whether I would qualify for a bonus, and I've never yet been denied the bonus. I just researched it all ahead of time on FT.