See Finance Strategy for information on how credit cards are useful.
Strategy
Credit factors, from most to least important
- Payment history: make all payments on time
- Credit utilization: use a small (< 10%) non-zero percentage of credit limit
- Length of credit history: have a lot of old open accounts
- Hard pulls: avoid hard pulls if possible
- Credit mix: diversity of lending accounts
To optimize the above
- New card every ~4-6 months
- Credit limit increase every income increase if it does not incur a hard pull
Annual fee cards can be dangerous if they end up not paying for themselves
- Consider only get cards that can downgrade into no annual fee version of the card
- Downgrading is preferred to canceling card because the account will disappear from your credit report, which may hurt your “length of credit history” factor on credit score
- Consider downgrading after first year
When applying
- Make sure to get a referral from a friend if possible
Chase only will approve you for a card if you have been approved for strictly less than 5 credit cards in the past 24 months. Chase cards happen to be some of the best cards, so it is advised to get up all the useful Chase cards you want first, then get non-Chase cards.
Generally recommended Chase cards: