Credit card options for retirees

[tgh]

heading back to the era of no/low interest

not gonna happen….

 

[Flashback]

heading back to the era of no/low interest

not gonna happen….

I had a mortgage in the UK that was 1.46%, that was a nice deal.

 

[AustraliaPoochie]

I've never heard of such a thing. How would a bank know your post retirement income and why would they check? I've had credit cards since 1998 and retired 10.5 years and had about 5 cards approved since. I'm on a government pension and topped up by a part age pension so not a big income.
I'm about to apply for my next card for maximum sign on bonus points so probable won't get it approved after putting a hex on myself by writing this!

The banks do know how much you earn, eg/ie, BankSA do list the category of income, "government payments" and the pension that is entered fortnightly into my mums account.
They also know who pays you.
Its more so if a bank officer is tasked, to do checking, or tracing, that they will call to confirm info.
I watch it like a warhawk.
There are a lot of things the bank knows, and you are lucky you havent had to do the FACTA report, "we notice that you have some information on your account from an overseas source"... just because I used an overseas passport (at that time) to open said account, then they want to know source of income, what is your job, who you are employed by, ... or was it KYC (know your customer), because the bank has to keep records re AML/CTF data keeping or reporting etc, ...
---===---
It comes under Source of Funds/Source of Wealth.

 

[Flyfrequently]

I wonder why people worry about the CC limit. As a retiree I have two cards with very low limits at $6,000 each. If I need to spend say $20k on something like a trip, then I transfer that amount into my CC, so I can still use the card, but using my own money, it has never been a problem. The limits are not an issue.

Amex discourage this @willclan
For them, it is a flag and they have advised me that the account can be closed.
Think we can thank all the money launderers out there for that !

 

[evaret]

We are both retired and my wife uses my credit card. Good credit rating, always paid the balance on time. A few friends (widows) had a lot of trouble getting their own credit card when the husband died. So my wife wanted to get her own now to avoid later problems. It was an excruciating sometimes surreal experience.

In our case I have a good defined benefit pension and low super balance. My wife has a very good super balance but she draws only the minimum amount. We have no mortgage and a late model car and caravan.

We tried 2 banks including Westpac that we had been with for over 20 years. While our financial arrangement was a concept staff understood the banks' 'system' or algorithm just could not grasp it. We had staff saying things like they understood and it will be approved or they had a widowed aunt that had the same problem. But No No No said the computer.

I think we tried 6 or 7 combinations including sitting in the office of a bank employee who helped us with the figures. The explanations for the rejection were bizarre. One bank said they couldn't tell her the reason for the rejection or the minimum fortnight income from super she needed because it was commercial-in-confidence. Another said the reason was that the system believed my wife earned too little to live on!

So where do you go from here?

Cheers

 

[burmans]

In my experience the white labelled Citibank cards are the easiest to get while retired. For credit decisions income is the only thing taken into account (not assets - it’s the law) so best I can suggest is increasing the drawdown for some months and then reapplying.