Treefan

i agree that anual fees are bad.  wow! a credit score of 835 is the highest  i've ever seen.  good show.

and take heed to ck's advice to keep your card's balance to below 35% always. great question.

thank you again ck for helping us understand the credit world. although my doctoral studies were aimed at rehab., i had to take advanced statistics in my core curriculum. my point being that i especially appreciate your graphs, histograms, etc., and the hard work your statisticians are putting into ck behind the scenes. i'm just so impressed with your site and deeply grateful. wheather a person has no degree or an advanced one the credit world was a shut door to understanding. what a person thought would help credit hurt it and vice versa. ck has lifted the vail for us to see what we need to do to improve our credit and i for one am very grateful.

notice on your credit karma reportcard how long it takes to improve ones credit. i would humbly suggest that you study your reportcard and go into details to learn how credit works. this website is terrific at spelling out the details of credit. my hats off to them. carali, credit improvement takes years to improve. study your report card and you will understand this. my advise is to follow your reportcard's suggestions and be patient. your score may be low today, but if you follow instructions for years to come, in five years you will add 150 points to your score.

be advised that at this writing i still have not received my 1400 balance transfer, discover told me that they must wait 13 days by law and after that time frame it could take another two weeks! so, you may be looking at one month for the actual transfer. fyi

i now have this card and received the fine print in the mail. be advised that hidden in all of paperwork is a 4% service charge for the balance you transfer. and notice that there are two 0% offers - one for six months and one for one year. if both balances (say a 1000$ transfer and a 1000$ charge)are on your statement as one sum and you send in, say, 200.00. which account does the 200 get applied to - the 1000 for 0% for a year or the 1000$ you charged with 0% for 6 months? it matters big time and you will notice they say nothing about it. i talked to discover about this and the bottom line is that the oldest "posted" accounts are paid first. so, if you charge something before your transfer arrives the money you send in will go toward the charges. after you pay off the charges you will begin to pay off your transfer. this is very very tricky and will cost you bucks if you do not keep up with these hidden "gotchas" credit card companies are so famous for.

The people above you that have millions or billions of dollars. Think of credit as stairsteps. You have a 600-699 step, a 700-799 step a 800-900 step. You are on the 800 step but are competing "statistically" with the superrich. It's the math that does all of the talking. You are in a superhigh position already and may never be able to move up because of the statistical weight of the wealthy. With your score you can buy whatever you want so having a higher score really wouldn't have any purchasing value. but I do understand the desire to constantly improve.

Extremely cool reply - ha ha ha ha ha.

Eventually, absolutely - but improving credit is very incremental - just a few points per yearly quarter, for example. This wonderful websight will let you watch you points accrue. You can go to this website's calculator and plug in numbers and situations and see what it does to your credit score.

Interesting observation.

I applied today for the card with a CK score of 738. Was aproved immediately for 3k, transferred 1.4k. My CK score went up 2 points on simulator. Thanks so much CK for your first class credit help site. I am very grateful for it. You've already saved me over $100.00 dollars (creditcard transfer to Discover). I will scrutinize every line of your site. Finally, some insight into how it all works? Praise the Lord. Thanks

Dear Mr. ** - Although this may not be the correct answer, I read an interesting answer to the same question the other day - it was that as we move higher and higher on the credit scoring graph we eventually move into a higher valued category. As we enter the new category at the bottom the rest of our category is at a higher level, which puts us at a low level compared to our peers. So, this dings our credit for a short time. In other words, to move up in credit value statistically we take a hit at first.