Balance Transfer Arbitrage

If you recently applied for a Citi card for a balance transfer, consider this tip: transfer an existing Citi credit limit to your new card prior to requesting the balance transfer. Citi currently has an unwritten limit of three or four cards per person and you might run up against that limit if you have any Citi cards. Personally, I had a Citi Professional card from a prior balance transfer, a Citi mtvU card for my personal purchases (it gives you 5% at restaurants and bookstores, Amazon.com counts as a bookstore), and a random Citi card I had just applied for in order to take advantage of a 0% APR no fee balance transfer offer. Well, one more card would represent my maximum of four but I would’ve been better served by consolidating my Citi card accounts. So, I consolidated the limits onto one card.

Why do they do this and why should you? They allow this because they’ve already given you the credit limit, it’s now just a bookkeeping issue when they reduce the number of cards by one. Why should you do this? It increases your credit limit prior to your balance transfer, meaning you have access to more funds than you did before the consolidation!