How Do people get so many credit cards?

chevalier

This is what I thought re about the banks doing cross referencing. I can understand the stores not doing it, but with the banks being under the fsa i thought they would.
And Sukey see my sig "we're here to help" if you want to see if we can see any savings to be made in your budget.

Thanks for the replies
chev

vivaladiva

Interesting thread this one. Must go and apply for M&S card (for balance transfer purposes only). Been putting it off because I thought I had too many cards! (I've only got 4!)

Idiophreak

I had 5 cards at one point, worth £17.5k.

I got them by applying for them.

(nb I didn't use all of them, or anything like that much)

nearlyrich

I worked out a couple of weeks ago that I had over double my annual salary available on my credit cards and if I wanted to go out and have a good spend no-one would query it. Fortunately I learned a long time ago that credit cards are only good if you pay them off before any interest becomes payable so a trip to the sales is not on the agenda for me.

bobbadog

I've only ever had one CC at a time, same as my OH... still managed to screw things up right royally!

Greengrass_4

Sukey wrote:

I had 10 with credit limits ranging from between £5000 and £15000. I now owe just over £80k on these cards with barely anything to show for it and life is now looking extremely bleak.
They kept being offered to me and I kept seeing it as a way to use one to pay the other as my salary didn't cover anywhere near the required minimum payments.
Whilst I absolutely know that my debt is my responsibility and down to my own stupidity, I do feel that there should be at least a code of conduct regarding how much credit the banks can let one person have. I earn £21k and yet I was allowed to have £100k of credit available! It seems laughable that this can happen, yet it's so not funny now and I'm certainly not laughing.

Suke

Hi Suke,

You are in a very similar situation to me. But are you doing something about it ?
Today i decided not to just go on like this and do something, my wife is backing me all the way in what i want to do to get out of debt.
I am going to contact cccs & payplan and get myself out of this mess !
Good luck

Mrs_J_3

Currently I have 6 credit cards and one store card. Thankfully I've just shifted the balances from a couple and so within a few weeks I'll be down to 3 cards in total, but it does scare me that I have easy peasy access to over £25K. I have made significant headway into my debt, but everytime I apply for a new card and I get a stupidly high limit I wince.

If you are meeting your minimum payments on your debts, the banks do not care, you are pure profit to them. It's only when you get in over your head that the suddenly want to rein in your spending.

mizmir

I have currently have 5 cards - combined limits must be over 60K! :eek: Thankfully I haven't used all that. I never asked for such ridiculous amounts - they just kept upping the limits. I have about 18K debt across three cards - most at low rates.

I am going to cancel one of the 15K limit ones which I haven't used for ages and which refuse to give me a decent balance transfer deal. :mad: But I have found the others useful to play against each other in getting good balance transfer deals - easier than applying for new cards. Reminds me I need to do some moving about again soon.

Martinslovechild

At its peak, I had £108,300 of credit available to me through 11 credit cards. At the time, this equated to nearly 3 times my annual salary. I borrowed just shy of £90,000 on the cards, all at 0% APR, and paid this into my Flexible Mortgage Offset Fund. In the meantime, I made minimum monthly payments to the Credit Card companies.

Towards the end of each 0% deal, I either moved the debt onto another new card or paid the card off by making a withdrawal from my offset account. This exercise has (so far) saved me £10,804 in mortgage interest.

My mortgage will be paid off altogether in 10 months, but there would have been nothing to stop me from blowing the lot on gambling, drinking & girls - it never stopped George Best, god rest his soul!

In answer to chevalier, the original poster, I believe that people are able to get so many cards because providing your credit report shows no problems, then a majority are prepared to throw money at you. A couple of companies declined my application along the way; I put this down to the number of cards that I had applied for during a 12-month period, however - a quick letter to both of these companies was enough to change their minds and the cards soon arrived in the post!

Essentially, we're all 'risk-assessed', i.e. do we need to borrow a large sum of money? Will they get this money back? Will they be able to charge us a lot of interest at the end of the 0% term?

It's sometimes ironic that those individuals (such as Bizzimum above) have little in the way of income but are still able to achieve huge credit limits. The biggest credit limit I have ever been able to achieve was nearly £25,000. I found this incredible given that at the time, I already had nearly £70,000 borrowed on other credit cards, but they were prepared to offer me such a high credit limit -- and at 0% for 18 months!!

I'm currently running my credit card stock down - I have just 5 cards with a combined credit limit of £48,700. This is still substantial I agree, but stoozing isn't what it once was now that most credit card companies charge for balance transfers.

If 0% no-fee cards came back in tomorrow, I'd more than likely ramp up my activity to maximum...

james32_uk

True moneysaving! :T