Applying for Credit Cards – Chase

Chase Credit Card Applications

Chase’s signup bonus rule has long been that once you have received a signup bonus for a particular credit card, you could not get that sign up bonus again. However, the terms on Chase’s card’s have changed recently. Card applications now say: “This new cardmember bonus offer is not available to either (i) current cardmembers of this consumer credit card, or (ii) previous cardmembers of this consumer credit card who received a new cardmember bonus for this consumer credit card within the last 24 months.”

Many, many offers

On my blog’s “Best Credit Card Offers” page, I list only the offers that I think are truly worth signing up for in order to get great sign-up bonuses. The truth is that there are so many great offers from Chase that I have had to separate their cards into separate categories. Simply pick a different card or two from Chase each time you’re ready to do a set of applications, and you’ll continue to get great bonuses time after time.

Warning – Applying for Chase Branded Cards

As of May, 2015 Chase has started cracking down on those with many recent credit card applications who apply for Chase branded cards. (Freedom, Ink, Sapphire Preferred, Slate.) There are many data points of people being denied for having five or more new credit card accounts across all banks over the past 2 years. You can find out more information about what is happening here. As of this time, cobranded cards like the Southwest, IHG, Marriott, etc. are not affected, but Chase seems to have tightened approvals overall on those cards too.

New products

Every now and then Chase alters an existing credit card so much that they consider it an entirely new product. This happened, for example, in 2014 when they changed the Chase Ink cards from Mastercard to Visa. Since Chase considered the new Ink cards to be different products from the old Ink cards, people were able to qualify for new signup bonuses even if they had the old versions of the cards.

Business cards

If you have more than one business, you can sign-up for the same exact card more than once. For example, I have two businesses: rental property, and my blog. So, I was able to sign up for the Ink Bold card twice: once under each business. I then did the same with the Ink Plus cards. That amounted to four great signup bonuses!  Note: I don’t know if this is strictly necessary, but I did use a different Tax ID for each business. I used my SSN for the rental property business, and the Tax ID of my LLC for the blog business.

Conclusion

Thanks to Chase having a huge number of great sign-up offers, flexible rules regarding similar products, and now allowing repeat bonuses on cards not held in the last 24 months, Chase is one of the most generous programs around, but be careful given their new rules for people who apply for a lot of cards. Getting approved by Chase isn’t as easy as it used to be.

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