American Express occasionally freezes the credit card accounts of individuals with high-risk patterns.
They request lots of personal information, such as IRS returns, that most people are hesitant to fax away in today’s age of security risks.
I personally have a dozen or so AMEX cards, and have never had a financial review, so I don’t speak from my own experience, but here are some important steps you can do to avoid the dreaded financial review:
-Keep your credit lines on each of your AMEX’s below $25,000.
One symptom commonly found among people who have been hit with a review is very high credit lines.
-NEVER utilize over 50% of the credit line of any of your AMEX cards.
If you have a Starwood card with a $10,000 limit, never have a balance of over $4,999, even if you pay it off every month on time.
-Keep your collective credit balances well below your stated annual income.
If you reported an annual income of $200,000, AMEX won’t like it if you have $190,000 of credit available to spend in one month.
What if you do get hit with a financial review?
Immediately call up AMEX and ask to close down every one of your accounts.
If the AMEX financial review bean-counters close your accounts they will say closed by issuer, which is quite bad.
If you pre-emptively close them they will simply say closed at customer request, and will barely hurt your credit.
Suffering from Starwood AMEX withdrawal?
Don’t worry!
Since you pre-emptively closed your accounts, just wait a few months and then you can apply all over again, and you will even get the signup bonus again!
