Ready to take a look at making money through App-O-Rama? First off, if you haven't read the Making Money with Credit Cards section, read it first! A successful AOR can be very profitable, but it can also be a lot of trouble if you don't do it correctly. The key lies in being organized and following directions exactly.
First off, a warning: this will temporarily lower your credit rating; while it should actually result in a higher rating in the long run (as the higher limits result in decreased utilization), you do not want to do this if you'll be making a major purchase (such as a house or car) in the next few months.
The first thing to do is make sure your credit rating is as high as possible. Pay down any credit cards with high balances, and you may also want to pull a copy of your credit report and make sure that no incorrect information is negatively affecting your credit score. If you have several cards with one company, you may wish to consolidate the limits in order to give yourself a high limit on one or more cards, increasing the chance that your new cards will have a high limit as well.
Second, make a list of credit cards that you plan to apply for; you can find some good ones in the credit card offers section. The primary considerations are a 0% interest rate on balance transfers and a capped BT fee; you can also look for cards that give bonuses. (For example, as of this writing Chase recently had a platinum card with a $250 bonus for opening the account). Don't bother applying for more than 2 or 3 from each issuer, as the extra applications will be rejected. That is, you could get a dozen different Visas, but don't try to get them all from Chase.
Now, you want to start early and apply for all of the cards within a few hours. There are two reasons for this. When you apply for a credit card, the companies will do a hard pull on your credit report, which drops your score. However, it takes a few days for that pull to show up, which means that if you get all the pulls to happen at once, none of the other pulls will have shown up yet. Additionally, these pulls will be grouped together, so will have less of an effect on your credit rating than if they were spread out. In fact, when I did a mini-AOR, the decreased utilization canceled out the pulls and my credit rating actually increased until I did the balance transfers.
Once you get the cards, double-check to make sure that the terms on the card they sent you match the terms on the card you applied for; you definitely don't want to get stuck using a card that has an uncapped fee and a high interest rate! If you now have several cards from one company (which is likely) you may be able to move credit around to give yourself higher limits on the new cards; just be sure they don't do another hard pull in that case.
Use balance transfer checks to deposit the money directly into your checking account; you may even be able to do this online. This is the part that will really drop your credit rating; when I did it, I used 98% of my available credit, realizing that it meant my credit rating would drop dramatically for a while. If you want to avoid that, restrict yourself to 60% of the available credit on any one card. Finally, set up automatic payments so that you cannot miss any of your due dates; all it takes is one missed payment for the companies to jack up your interest rates. That done, leave enough in the account to cover your payments and put the rest in a high-interest CD, then sit back and enjoy profiting on the credit card company's money.
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