Applied for a new Citi card; Citi cancels one of my other accounts?
Nov 22, 2005, 9:47 pm
#1
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Applied for a new Citi card; Citi cancels one of my other accounts?
I applied for the Citi premierPass Elite and was approved. However, Citi canceled one of my other accounts (fortunately, the one I use and value the least) with them and said it was due to "Customer request." The credit line on that account was transferred and added to the new card. Not a big deal, but has anyone else had this happen? I just thought it was an odd way of doing things.
Nov 22, 2005, 11:36 pm
#3
Join Date: Feb 2005
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MBNA did that to me once, but I didn't care much about it. I have multiple Citicards and none of them have been cancelled without my request. I suspect it must be an internal error.
Nov 22, 2005, 11:57 pm
#4
Join Date: Jul 2005
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I highly doubt this was done in error because I've heard of this being done before. I don't think it's fair to the cardholder -- what if the card that gets closed was the card that held the longest age? Imagine the damage done to ones FICO score!
Nov 23, 2005, 8:33 am
#6
Join Date: Oct 2003
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An issuing creditor has so much credit they are willing to give any particular person. If you open a new card & you have lots of other cards from that issuer close to your total credit max, they will need to re-distribute the credit amongst all your cards, or cancel an older/unused card & transfer the credit to the new card. This (re-distribute) has happened to me before, the CSR was kind enough to explain & offer to redistribute or close 1 acct.
Nov 23, 2005, 12:53 pm
#7
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Originally Posted by ET
An issuing creditor has so much credit they are willing to give any particular person. If you open a new card & you have lots of other cards from that issuer close to your total credit max, they will need to re-distribute the credit amongst all your cards, or cancel an older/unused card & transfer the credit to the new card. This (re-distribute) has happened to me before, the CSR was kind enough to explain & offer to redistribute or close 1 acct.
IMO, it's okay for Citi to redistribute your CLs. After all, as you state, every customer has his/her own exposure limit. However, redistributions and closings of accounts should be done with notification and authorization.
Nov 23, 2005, 2:14 pm
#8
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Join Date: May 1998
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Very strange. I have always had several Citibank cards. When I apply for a new one, they always call me saying they issued it with a $500 limit, cannot give me a larger limit because the combined limits on all of my cards are at the maxiumum they will loan me, and would I like to move limits from an old card to the new one.
Nov 23, 2005, 6:28 pm
#9
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Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Florida
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$500 limit ?! what useful that can be ?
Originally Posted by pgary
Very strange. I have always had several Citibank cards. When I apply for a new one, they always call me saying they issued it with a $500 limit, cannot give me a larger limit because the combined limits on all of my cards are at the maxiumum they will loan me, and would I like to move limits from an old card to the new one.
Last edited by Happy; Jul 26, 2006 at 11:27 am
Nov 23, 2005, 9:02 pm
#10
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I've had Citi offer to tranfer my credit limit to the card I keep when I cancel the one I churn. I've never taken them up on the offer since I don't want the credit. Maybe its a good thing I don't have them transfer it since the next one I churn would cause the above problem.
Nov 23, 2005, 10:44 pm
#11
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So it was strange! I did get the $500 credit card once when I opened one account too many, but this time they just closed one of my accounts. I would have preferred they offer to distribute my credit limits, but the damage to my FICO shouldn't be too bad - I've only had the card for 18 months.
Dec 1, 2005, 11:33 pm
#12
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I had had 4 citibank cards when I applied for the premier pass card, and so that was the limit, so they asked which card I wanted to close and the credit line was transferred.
Dec 2, 2005, 1:50 pm
#13
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I had the same thing happen when I got a Citi card a couple years back. I had an old Universal card, and I applied for the Citi Dividend. Got a letter saying they killed my Universal account. I didn't care. It meant they gave me a reasonable limit on the Dividend instead, and I wasn't using that one. I'm sure it was dormant for a while, and they saw that history. It was right after I got my mortgage, so they probably were wary of having more credit exposure to me until they saw what was going to happen with that. I believe I may have also had Sears (which is run by Citi as I recall) and Amazon Credit (run by Citi, although that's such a tiny limit in the scheme of things).