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I applied for the Citi premierPass Elite and was approved. However, Citi canceled one of my other accounts (fortunately, the one I use and value the least) with them and said it was due to "Customer request." The credit line on that account was transferred and added to the new card. Not a big deal, but has anyone else had this happen? I just thought it was an odd way of doing things.
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Yes, this is very odd. Has to be some kind of misunderstanding.
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MBNA did that to me once, but I didn't care much about it. I have multiple Citicards and none of them have been cancelled without my request. I suspect it must be an internal error.
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I highly doubt this was done in error because I've heard of this being done before. I don't think it's fair to the cardholder -- what if the card that gets closed was the card that held the longest age? Imagine the damage done to ones FICO score!
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I don't know as of today, but I have been successful in converting my existing card account into another type back in 2002. Like many, a concern was opening date and credit history built on that account. ^
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An issuing creditor has so much credit they are willing to give any particular person. If you open a new card & you have lots of other cards from that issuer close to your total credit max, they will need to re-distribute the credit amongst all your cards, or cancel an older/unused card & transfer the credit to the new card. This (re-distribute) has happened to me before, the CSR was kind enough to explain & offer to redistribute or close 1 acct.
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An issuing creditor has so much credit they are willing to give any particular person. If you open a new card & you have lots of other cards from that issuer close to your total credit max, they will need to re-distribute the credit amongst all your cards, or cancel an older/unused card & transfer the credit to the new card. This (re-distribute) has happened to me before, the CSR was kind enough to explain & offer to redistribute or close 1 acct.
If I read his post correctly, there's a big difference between what happened to you all, and what happened to the OP. In the OP's case, the account was not closed with his authorization -- they simply shut his older account down, said it was due to "Customer request" (when he hadn't requested anything at all), and shifted the CL over to his new card.
IMO, it's okay for Citi to redistribute your CLs. After all, as you state, every customer has his/her own exposure limit. However, redistributions and closings of accounts should be done with notification and authorization.
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Very strange. I have always had several Citibank cards. When I apply for a new one, they always call me saying they issued it with a $500 limit, cannot give me a larger limit because the combined limits on all of my cards are at the maxiumum they will loan me, and would I like to move limits from an old card to the new one.
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Very strange. I have always had several Citibank cards. When I apply for a new one, they always call me saying they issued it with a $500 limit, cannot give me a larger limit because the combined limits on all of my cards are at the maxiumum they will loan me, and would I like to move limits from an old card to the new one.
Citi always called to redistribute credit limit, and always said if I dont want to redistribute, then the new card they can only issue with a $2000 credit limit. I felt the $2000 is kind of low. Did not know they even issue $500 limit.
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I've had Citi offer to tranfer my credit limit to the card I keep when I cancel the one I churn. I've never taken them up on the offer since I don't want the credit. Maybe its a good thing I don't have them transfer it since the next one I churn would cause the above problem.
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So it was strange! I did get the $500 credit card once when I opened one account too many, but this time they just closed one of my accounts. I would have preferred they offer to distribute my credit limits, but the damage to my FICO shouldn't be too bad - I've only had the card for 18 months.
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I had had 4 citibank cards when I applied for the premier pass card, and so that was the limit, so they asked which card I wanted to close and the credit line was transferred.
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I had the same thing happen when I got a Citi card a couple years back. I had an old Universal card, and I applied for the Citi Dividend. Got a letter saying they killed my Universal account. I didn't care. It meant they gave me a reasonable limit on the Dividend instead, and I wasn't using that one. I'm sure it was dormant for a while, and they saw that history. It was right after I got my mortgage, so they probably were wary of having more credit exposure to me until they saw what was going to happen with that. I believe I may have also had Sears (which is run by Citi as I recall) and Amazon Credit (run by Citi, although that's such a tiny limit in the scheme of things).
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This story is a bit worrisome for those of us who have many cards. Wow, I would have never imagined.