I originally wrote this a few months ago but only just now finished it. Some of the details in the post may be a little out of date but they were accurate at the time. I’m now working on the next article in the series and will have that up within the next few days.

This is the first in a multi-part series of posts on building up your credit lines. I’ve been reviewing the credit lines I have open and working to improve my credit scores as much as possible to prepare to apply for a number of new credit cards. The benefit of this is to both grab a bunch of account opening bonuses as well as taking advantage of 0% balance transfer offers.

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This will be a short note as I am leaving for LA in a few minutes for a meeting with my largest client…

Just wanted to post to say we retired our HELOC debt this week! You may remember my post back in November about setting goals.

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Apologies for not having this up first thing in the morning. There were a lot more submissions to go through than I expected…

Anyway, without further ado, I present the 80th installment of the Carnival of Personal Finance! I’ll be reading through the submissions I haven’t already today and moving the catagories or deleting irrelevant posts. If you find any problems, please contact me.

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I’ve had a Direct Merchant’s Mastercard for years (they have now merged with HSBC). Today I got an alert from TrueCredit that my account had been closed?!?

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This is the first post of a series I’ll be doing on government and other public sources of solid financial information. I’ve added a category called Financial Information Resources which will contain all of the posts in the series. I’ll be characterizing and rating the sites based on the type of information they have as well as how valuable I found it to be. So without further delay, my guide to Financial Information Resources:

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I received my $50 bonus for opening the Smart Package Checking account with them. (You had to open a Smart Checking Plus and a Money Market account.) I already had an Online Savings account so I only keep $25 in the Money Market. I’m most of the way through the process of making HSBC my primary bank. All that is really left to do is have my paychecks direct deposited into my HSBC account. Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog has a scan of an offer he received and some other info there (use code Get50 when opening the account.)
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It seems the interest rate I offered was too low (5%) and my listing only received 1 bid for $100.  I withdrew the listing in order to free up that person’s money (a winning bid is essentially held in escrow and cannot be bid on any other loan requests.)

I may try again in a bit but since I can still borrow more money at 0% from a couple of credit cards and even more at 1.99% I may just pass.  For now I think I’ll wait and slowly increase the number of loans I have until there is some cash flow coming in.   Once that is happening I may consider borrowing even at 1.99% and loaning the money out.  It should be relatively easy to earn better than that even with a default or two.  The loan payments could then go towards paying off the credit card and whatever is left could be used to finance further loans.  Will have to see how smoothly things go with the money I am prepared to lose 100% of before committing any that I am not…

Just when I thought we were going to have to pay 1.99% on the truck we bought a couple of 0% deals came along.

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Somewhat surprising… Both of the credit cards I applied for were denied… (Citi and Chase) Both were due to my bankruptcy back in 2000 and some related judgments which occurred in 1999. I find this interesting since my credit score is a healthy 749 now (and will likely rise into the 760-770’s again once we pay off the 0% card in late December/early January.) I also have a couple of inquiry’s dropping off of my report this month. My peak score was 773 back in August.

In any case it appears that even an older bankruptcy can be a scarlet letter…

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I’ve been searching for a new rewards credit card for the last week since I’ve maxed my Household Bank card ($400 cash back per year). I’ve applied for the Citi Rewards card but haven’t received a decision yet. I may get turned down due to my bankruptcy even though my credit score is now in the mid 700’s.

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