Kevin20

Thanks! I wasn't sure how high non-Billionaires can get with credit limits. I'd be perfectly happy with another card in the ~$25 to $30 K range. I do have a reportable 6-figure income (barely!) Just didn't want to waste my time applying for a card only to get $5,000.

Hi folks, been a long time since I was a regular here. In a couple months I should be back above 800 credit score (got there a couple years ago but then had to go through a cycle of buying stuff and racking up some balances for awhile). When I get past 800 again I want to add another card. I have 5 but one thing I don't have is the huge credit limits I've seen people talk of here in years past. I have a $23,500 limit card and a $12,500 limit card but I know cards go a lot higher than that. Is there any particular brand or line of a brand I should look for that will reward good income and good credit score with highest limit? Thanks.

YMMV... I think there are more subtle issues at stake here than the article discusses.

Now that's what you call a liquid investment.

This article and Oxfam's pointless imagining is kind of bogus. The article says Gates is richer than he was 10 years ago, but fails to mention Gates is LESS wealthy than he was in year 2000. And the reason is that Microsoft stock has actually gone nowhere in 17 years. Microsoft rode the dot-come bubble and then crash to more realistic values in the early 2000s. Gates hit the $100 billion mark around 2000. Now 17 years later neither he nor anyone else is worth $100 billion. Someday somebody, maybe, but it won't be Gates and probably not in the next few decades.

Read it again. There were three separate experiments done after the initial data analysis and were not mined from the data set. You either don't understand what they wrote, or you don't understand what I wrote. "In our third experiment, we set out to discover why the one-card-at-a-time repayment strategy increases subjects’ sense of progress, and what specific repayment strategy had the biggest effect on perception. We tested a variety of hypotheses and ultimately determined that it is not the size of the repayment or how little is left on a card after a payment that has the biggest impact on people’s perception of progress; rather it’s what portion of the balance they succeed in paying off...." When you conduct an experiment, what you do state a hypothesis, and then you conduct an experiment so as to test whether that hypothesis is likely correct, or not. That's what they say they did for experiment #1. That's what they say they did for experiment #2. OK so far. But that's not what they say they did for experiment #3. You don't bundle a bunch of different hypotheses together and then run a single experiment to see what happens -- that's not how it's done because you have a mess of confounding factors. If you read their exact words I just quoted, they do not claim to have done that, nor do they claim to have run multiple different experiments each with its own hypothesis. "We tested a variety of hypotheses" is not the same as saying they did multiple separate full-on experiments -- on the contrary, they've already said this was under the "third experiment", singular. There is no reason to assume they really DID do separate proper experiments but now they can't speak clear English and say so. That's assuming and projecting. And so my point is while they don't admit to "data mining" in so many words, it's pretty clear to me based on their words that that's exactly what they did in experiment #3 -- that's what they meant by testing a variety of hypotheses in a single experiment. If you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, help yourself. I could be wrong, because I'm not going to look this up in the Journal of Consumer Research -- maybe it's all clear there. But they way they wrote this article sounds like exactly what I'm accusing them of.

I wonder if their creditors hired them to harass themselves for debt payments? Maybe their pressure on themselves got too much.

>> In our third experiment..... We tested a variety of hypotheses and ultimately determined that it is not the size of the repayment or how little is left on a card after a payment that has the biggest impact on people’s perception of progress; rather it’s what portion of the balance they succeed in paying off. << Just to be an annoying jerk I'll say this is unconvincing, because the researchers clearly just data-mined the data after the fact on this part, til they found some correlation. The only thing that gets you is random patterns that happened just by chance (or at least, you cannot prove that's not the case, so it must be assumed.)

You'd think a Congressman could get better rewards than that.

The problem with Ponzi schemes is eventually you run short on people to pay into the scheme in order to keep up with the promised payouts Hilarious but it's not a ponzi scheme, it's very openly and publicly a transfer system funded by current taxpayers. We're certainly in no danger of running out of taxpayers any time soon. Not in your retirement or mine. Millennials may be a bunch of whiners but there certainly are a lot of them, and they'll be cannon fodder for the tax man for decades to come. Now if we were Japan or Italy it would be a different story, they have really poor demographics. Personally I'd rather have a privatized system that allows people to make real investments in assets (which Social Security emphatically does not do), but that seems to be politically impossible as far as the eye can see.

Wow, if there is still such a thing, surely the average age of their clients is like 80.

The answer is pretty obvious, it's marketing. AmEx wants celebrities to be out in public using its most premier card. In the same vein that celebrities get a lot of free goodies as a matter of product placement, even though they can more easily afford things than the rest of us. No doubt AmEx has some celebrity relations department that reviews these things and decides what wannabes makes the cut. They probably proactively reach out to every guy who gets drafted into the NFL for example (or maybe just those picked in the first 2 rounds of the draft or something).

This isn't the answer you want, but seems to me that you're trying to walk a tightrope while performing brain surgery. What you're attempting is too tricky. If it's a problem that you cannot make three payments in 15 days and that's causing you to late-pay bills, you're doing something wrong. Namely, you should probably not get carried away with putting your entire life on a rewards card, until you have a rewards card with plenty of credit available and have comfortable float for your operations.

I wonder what the footnotes refer to? I see the superscripts 2 and 3, but they do not refer to anything actually on that page.

It's amazing how people can be corrupted by money to do the most appalling things to people they once were so close to.