Alliant Credit Union

Alliant Savings raised to 1.25%.

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I did that and moved my HSA in full to LMCU. Rate was 1% and easy to deal with. I like having it Alliant because it was one less account to have open, but what can you do?

I have belonged to Alliant CU for over 10 years & was denied this credit card.
True I do not have any credit because I pay cash or use my Business CC with Citi Bank. I was informed that a Business CC does not qualify as credit with the Credit Bureau. Hard to understand!
Alliant CU offered me the option to open a Platinum CC if I would send a multiple amount of information. ID, SS card, Paid bill with address, & Last 2 yrs IRS. I decided to go for this one! It gives only 2% cash back rather than the 2.5%.
So hard to understand…:wink:

It’s not hard to understand if there’s not much on your credit report because you don’t use credit and there’s no record of payments. Expect some difficulty in getting credit.

Check CreditKarma or get a free report from the credit bureaus. The score and long-term record is primarily what they go by.

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Most card issuers (other than maybe Capital One and similar subprime issuers) will decline you if you do not have any personal credit history. Some business CCs do report to personal credit, but most don’t. Alliant’s offer of a 2% CB card contingent on income verification is actually rather generous if you truly do not have any personal credit history (not even old closed cards or loans); it’s unlikely any other issuer would offer that.

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After review of my info that Alliant CU requested. I was approved for the Platinum CC with a $2500 limit.
My Citi Business Card allows $60K credit limit, so $2500 is a rude awakening.
My Business card gives airline mileage, which I have enjoyed for many years (First Class flying). This card has a high fee attached & I’d like to drop that part.
Also the new card gives cash back which sounds good and no fee. I will see if I can build my credit & get my credit limit increased by charging & paying off quickly.

Switching from a business card to a personal card for personal use is a good move. Business cards have fewer legal protections than personal cards, which creates somewhat of a tail risk for you if you happen to run into a billing or security/fraud issue. While card issuers can voluntarily provide protections on business cards that meet or exceed legal requirements for personal cards (and can include language in their contracts to that effect), you’re still in a stronger position if you have laws, regulations, and regulators (like the CFPB, although it’s unfortunately in the process of being neutered) protecting you.

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Almost ten years ago I applied for an Alliant card under similar circumstances. There was no credit history. I talked with someone on the phone and told them my situation and they gave me a $500 limit.

I used the card and applied for CL increases every 6 months until I reached $20K.

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You would think that if a person has been with Alliant as long as I (over 10 yrs) would get a break. But if you were given only $500 limit, I guess I’m lucky to get a $2500 limit with no credit history (if the credit bureau would check back 15-20 years they would see that I had credit in the past). I plan to use the cc up to $2500, then pay it off immediately. I’ll do this for a period of time then call and ask for an increase in the limit.

To be fair, there are friends I’ve known 20+ years that I wouldn’t trust to pay me back $500 and I have far more leverage over them than Alliant has over you.

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Charging up to the credit limit would be a mistake and makes it likely you would not get a CL increase.

Credit card utilization is the most important portion of your credit score. You want to keep it as low as possible, If you max it out, you will be showing 100% utilization of your credit line and you will have a very low credit score.

I try to keep my utilization at 1-2%.

Credit grantors want to see you use credit responsibly over a period of time – your best bet is to simply use the card for six months and pay it off on time.

You will achieve a fine credit rating by making a few charges per month, or even one, even if $25 a month. In fact, that would be ideal.

You can keep track of your credit score at CreditKarma.

In my experience, if you don’t charge much on a card, the issuer won’t increase your credit limit, and may even decrease it. They might also cut your line significantly if you don’t use or use sparingly for a while and then suddenly charge a single huge transaction. This depends on the issuer, of course – Amex doesn’t seem to care about usage (if you follow the 3X rule), CapOne and Discover do. Don’t know about Alliant yet.

I suspect that for some issuers it’s not a matter of “charging”, but a matter of statement balance. I had one conversation when the rep told me I haven’t been using the card at all for many months, but in reality I’ve been using it and pre-paying the balance so all my statements showed $0. In other words, their CLI decision looked at statement balances, not actual usage.

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In my experience, mostly with credit unions, the issuer will increase your limit as long as you have used credit responsibly. I have several cards which increased credit limits even although I only made a small charge once every six months.

The credit score is much more important to them. If you show 100% credit utilization every month your score is going to be quite low.

Getting CLIs is mostly a function of time. The amounts I’ve charged seem to have nothing to do with it, as long as at least something was charged…

Alliant has once again raised its savings rate. Rate is now at 1.3% APY.

Very nice.

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I’m having a hard time sticking with Alliant as Ally’s rates get better and better.

Their no-penalty 11 month CD is now 1.75% with a $25k min.

I like Alliant and like more interest but Alliant seems to be doing catch up.

Discover’s AAII account is still ahead at 1.35%

https://aaii.discoverbank.com/aaii/index.html

1.35% isn’t enough of a delta for me to change. Good to see Alliant raising rates again. My local credit union is still at 0.05%…and you pay $3/month dues. Ha.

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Agreed! I don’t really understand rate chasing in general. Unless it is a large balance, it makes minimal difference. (If large, I would think it would be better to invest most of it unless you have a short term goal).

I guess that approach works for some folks…

In general I agree, but Alliant has been lagging behind for some time now so my money has (mostly) left awhile ago and I was noting that this wasn’t enough to match what I am getting elsewhere.

In addition, I believe that emergency funds should be somewhat substantial and liquid (not be invested) but that is getting more off topic.

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I am a newer 6 month member. Primarily to boost our cash back on cc purchases. Their website is sub-par. There are no SMS warnings, you cannot download to Quicken by selecting a statement. When a fraud transaction was found by me they were very passive, and not aggressive. They did NOT replace the card, (the jury is out on this) and their customer service acted like this stuff does not happen often. I like the intro 3% and 2.5% there after the $59 annual fee is not a killer for us.