Before Accepting Credit Cards Online For Limited Time Offers Get Informed!

Accepting Credit Cards Online: Know the Time Limits

If your application goes down to the wire, you should still be eligible for the limited time offer as long as you get your application submitted before the offer ends. You’ll still need to be approved but a pending application doesn’t mean you missed out on the offer. It only means that the bank needs more time to review your application (but you will get the higher bonus as soon as you’re approved).

Basics on Reconsideration Lines

Sometimes you’ll apply for a standard credit card offer and a better offer will go live within a few weeks. In this case, you can often get your old offer matched to the new offer as long as the other terms (minimum spend, annual fee, etc.) remain the same.

Chase is one of the best when it comes to matching higher offers while with Amex it can be more difficult. The easiest way to get an offer matched with Chase is to just send a secure message from your account dashboard. Amex’s public stance is that they won’t match offers but I’ve had success getting them to give me ‘goodwill adjustments’ if better sign-up bonus offers come out within a month or two. You just have to pester them a little bit.

Citi still does it the old fashioned way: you’ll have to fax in a copy of the new offer if you want to get it matched.

Should You Apply For Multiple Cards in The Same Day?

Some people like to apply for cards in bunches but that could lead them to miss out on a limited time offer. There isn’t any real hard evidence that this strategy will help you either. Every application will cause a credit inquiry and I think it’s better to spread out the spend requirements so that you don’t have to do it all at once.

If you do decide to use this strategy though, you should apply to the most stringent banks first. Out of the big four banks, Barclaycard is usually the strictest so I like to apply with them first, Amex and Chase are somewhere in the middle of the pack and Citi is usually the easiest to get approved with, so I save them for last.

Hitting The Required Spend

The last thing you’ll have to watch out for with limited time offers is increased spending requirements. In general, when credit card companies are giving out more points, they want you to spend more. One recent example of that was the Citi Executive AAdvantage card.

Normally this card comes with a 50,000 point sign up bonus after you spend $5,000 in 3 months. But over the summer, they actually had a limited time offer of 100,000 points after $10,000 in spending (within 3 months). That’s a whole lot of points but it’s also a whole lot of spending.