Bryce Yehl

Bumpage has finally kicked in, nine hard inquiries have prematurely fallen off of my credit report this week. TransUnion has been dropping one every few days while Equifax has suddenly started dropping one with every soft inquiry. At this rate they should both be free of hard inquiries in another week or two. Sadly this trick does not work against Experian, but I have a plan for the next phase of my credit repair strategy…

The upshot is that I just got an instant approval for a Citibank card with a limit at the higher end of my current cards. This shows that what I’ve been doing has been working — I’ve applied for and been denied a Citi card every couple of months — and will allow me to cancel a stack of lower-limit cards without increasing my overall utilization.

Last week American Express whacked me with a financial review, which is where they suspend your account and demand financial records, in my case an IRS form 4506T to authorize the release prior tax returns. It is a decidedly unpleasant process and while I don’t think it’s likely that they will close my account, they are my largest credit grantor and I wouldn’t be surprised if they reduced my limits.

But the kicker is that they called last night to ask how I felt about my last contact, how I’d rate the company, would I recommend them to someone else, etc. To one of the questions my response was You’re fucking joking, right? Truthfully, all of my interactions with AmEx customer service have been friendly and even the FR agents have been nice, but with my FR still pending it’s hard to have any positive feelings towards the company…

Another birthday goes by this week. I still haven’t come to terms being 30. A friend from my teenage years pointed out that we’re still young but she still has another year to be twenty-something.