See Finance Strategy for information on how credit cards are useful.

Strategy

Credit factors, from most to least important

• Payment history: make all payments on time
• Credit utilization: use a small (< 10%) non-zero percentage of credit limit
• Length of credit history: have a lot of old open accounts
• Hard pulls: avoid hard pulls if possible
• Credit mix: diversity of lending accounts

To optimize the above

• New card every few months
• Request credit limit increase every income increase if it does not incur a hard pull
  • Some cards you can request yourself and some automatically increase when you update income

Annual fee cards can be dangerous if they end up not paying for themselves

• You can product change (PC) most cards into other cards that have a lesser or no annual fee
• PC is preferred to canceling card because the account will disappear from your credit report, which may hurt your “length of credit history” factor on credit score

When applying

• Make sure to get a referral
  • See my referral links below in My Credit Card
  • Referrals can also be found at https://churning.rankt.com/referrals/

Chase 5/24

Chase only will approve you for a card if you have been approved for strictly less than 5 credit cards in the past 24 months. Chase cards happen to be some of the best cards, so it is advised to get up all the useful Chase cards you want first, then get non-Chase cards.

Generally recommended Chase cards:

• Chase Freedom Flex — great rewards + sign on bonus