Saturday, March 10, 2007

The Tricky World of Credit

Our joint credit card billing cycle ended on Wednesday and I took a look at the online statement on Thursday. I discovered that the credit limit has been increased to $6,500. That’s a jump of $2,000! I can’t even imagine spending that much money using a credit card. Maybe it’s because it’s so engrained in me to pay off the full balance each month and paying $6,500 at one time just seems ridiculous.

I’m definitely not going to complain about this increase. We generally try to keep the monthly bills to around $500 (although we haven’t been doing so well lately with various wedding things, vet bills, etc.) Even so, our debt to credit ratio will rock even more now.

We put pretty much everything on the one card except for normal bills (rent, electric, cable, etc.) and we’ve earned over 13,000 WorldPoints since we opened the account. I don’t know what we’re going to do with them yet but we originally opened the account to rack up points for something honeymoon related. We’ll see what’s out there in the next few months I suppose. We know we’ll be earning a decent amount of additional points when we start making finals payments for the honeymoon and reception. Yay for spending lots of money! :)

My personal credit card also earns me points and I redeem them for $50 checks every 5,000 points. It’s a easy way to make some free money since I pay off the balance every month and never pay interest or fees. You just have to know how to work the system.

I checked my credit score again last night to see how things are going and it's in the high 700s still. My goal is to get it over the 800 mark but I don't know what I can do to bump it up. I only have 3 credit cards and one loan (my car). I have never been late or defaulted on anything. Right now I'm at 24% credit line usage. I have a spotless credit history of almost 10 years. The most recent line of credit is the MBNA (well, BofA now) card we opened almost a year ago now. I don't know what I can do to increase my score since pretty much all the things people tell you to do I'm already doing. *Sigh*

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Some more suggestions to help you:
1) Buy a house and pay it on time
2) Periodically spend a lot and pay it all off (ie - bump up your "high-credit" numbers

I guess, in short, be a very active, extensive, and reliable credit user.