The Hidden Rules of Credit Card Approvals
All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
Chris Hutchins
4.8 ⢠1.6K Ratings
đď¸ 27 May 2026
âąď¸ 51 minutes
đď¸ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | At any given point in time, there are plenty of lucrative welcome bonuses on credit cards, |
| 0:04.9 | 100,000 points, 200,000 points, sometimes even more. And who doesn't want that? Now, maybe you've |
| 0:10.9 | already had some of those bonuses, but here's something that happens to almost everyone eventually. |
| 0:15.8 | You get a denial. It's happened to me, and just this past week I got an email from someone |
| 0:20.5 | with an 820 credit |
| 0:21.9 | score who got denied for a card he was sure he would qualify for. |
| 0:25.7 | For some, it's getting denied on that card you really want. |
| 0:28.8 | For others, it's a string of denials across different issuers, and it's rarely because something |
| 0:33.7 | went wrong with your credit score. |
| 0:35.4 | What's actually happening is that there is a system behind every credit card approval, one that every bank uses, even if they each tune it a little |
| 0:43.0 | differently. Today, I'm going to walk you through how that system works, what banks actually look at |
| 0:48.4 | when you apply, and how to improve your odds of getting approved for the credit cards you actually |
| 0:53.3 | want. |
| 0:59.6 | Let's start looking at my own credit report. And if you pulled my FICO score, it swings anywhere from 50 to 80, even 100 points in various different months. Sometimes it's as high as 850, |
| 1:06.1 | and sometimes it's in the mid-700s. So the question is why? Well, sometimes my cards report with really high |
| 1:13.1 | balances and look like they're being 80, 90% utilized, which is true, but it's not that I'm |
| 1:19.3 | carrying any balances. I'm always paying in full. I just pay after the statement closes, not before. |
| 1:25.6 | Now, there is a way to avoid this. You can pay your statement before the statement cuts. |
| 1:31.3 | So if your statement closes on the 15th of June, |
| 1:34.3 | you could pay it off on the 14th so it closes at a $0 balance. |
| 1:39.3 | Now, that's great for reducing your utilization, |
| 1:41.3 | but we will get to why you might not actually want to do that. |
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