Capital One credit card mini-reviews

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mini reviews

When I first created our Best Credit Card Offers page, about 6 years ago, I included mini reviews with each card. Since then I’ve done a poor job at keeping that going.  To fix that, I’m working on adding mini reviews to each card, one bank at a time.  Since I had exactly zero mini reviews for the Capital One cards despite them having a number of excellent early spend bonus offers, I decided to start there.  What follows are the mini reviews that can also be found in the Capital One section of our Best Offers page.  Expect to see similar updates for other banks in the near future.

A note about Capital One credit card applications

When you apply for a Capital One credit card, you’ll usually get hard inquiries on all three credit bureau reports (most banks pull from just one or two).  This can be an issue if you already have a lot of inquiries.  Some who apply for cards often like to balance out their inquiries by applying for cards from issuers that pull from different bureaus in order to avoid getting denied for future applications due to “too many recent inquiries”.  If you only apply for a few cards per year, this is probably not going to be an issue for you.  To see which credit bureaus each bank pulls from in your state, search the CreditBoards Credit Pulls Database.

Also note that Capital One does report business credit cards to the credit bureaus.  So, unlike business cards from most other banks, Capital One business cards will count against your 5/24 status which can make it harder to get certain Chase credit cards in the near future.  More info can be found here.

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Ma'am

I agree that Capital One is not the best choice (my experience is with personal CC as I don’t have any gigs to do business CC). We got Venture cards (1 for me + 2 for spouse) and canceled them after one year and have been denied ever since.

I also read a few times that Capital One doesn’t really like to issue more than 2 personal CC’s to the same applicant. I’ve even considered to cancel my Quicksilver because I’ve not used it for years. I’d love to decrease the # of CC’s I have, but OTOH I’ve had Quicksilver for so long I’m hesitant to cancel it. I wonder how many points I’d lose on my FICO score if I did it and how long it would take to regain them.

jit

Also worth noting that their business cards show up on personal credit report if the owner’s SSN is used in the application instead of an EIN. Found this out the hard way after making a $20,000 charge for a conference site 2 weeks before trying to refinance my house. I reached out to Cap1 to ask them to remove the account from my personal report and was told no.

jit

Sorry. Missed that. Read too fast. That’s a really important point these days. I don’t recall seeing that anywhere other than your article.

DCJoe

Greg, you might want to think about highlighting that Capital One often denies applicants who have very good credit and a lot of open cards. Their sweet spot customer is one with okay credit who has pretty good income and thus might run up some debt on the card and pay interest over time. They have little desire to have churners or people who will pay the card off in full each month as customers.

I got a couple of Capital One cards no problem back before I started churning in earnest, and have been denied by them twice since then. Read similar reports on reddit and flyertalk. Seems likely many of your readers will be wasting 3 (!) hard pulls for nothing by applying for Capital One cards.

Daniel Puffington

Your analysis makes sense. A few years back, Cap One readily handed me two credit cards (a journey and a quicksilver) within a year after declaring bankruptcy. I found it strange, even considering that I had discharged like 14k alone on a Cap One card during said bankruptcy. XD