If opening a new credit line and getting a hard hit on your credit report is worth $80, fine. But in absolutely no way was that a product discount. Amazon credited you $80 for opening a credit card with them. All credit cards have rewards. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of that product.
I agree the 80 dollar discount is irrelevant to the Chromebook but...
Is signing up for a credit card and for your credit report? I would have thought that as long as you pay it off promptly each month it's an overall benefit to your credit score?
Every time you apply for a new card, you get a hard pull. Credit agencies don't like too many hard pulls in a short period of time because it looks reckless to open so many new lines of credit at once.
It's unlikely that opening a new credit card from time to time will do serious damage to your credit. And over the long term, having a lot of credit available can be beneficial to your credit score.
Some employers will even decide who to hire based on their credit score. Bad credit = can't get a job. John Oliver did a bit on the whole credit scoring system scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRrDsbUdY_k
The credit score is used for all sorts of things in the US, from the interest rate on your mortgage to qualifying for renting to even some employment checks. It's fucked up, especially since the formula for calculating the 'score' differs from one agency to another and is deliberately kept obscured.
Yeah that's why I really don't pay attention to it. Plus the fact that it is so easily gamed: if a party wanted to (such as a realtor or someone else with access), they could just run hard credit checks on you all day and tank your score.
To illustrate how fucked it is, I use a credit tracking app from my bank and it consistently reports scores of 700 and above yet I've had realtors tell me they weren't sure if I could get an apartment because of my credit score - showing up with enough cash for the first six months of payments quickly resolved that issue.
It also lowers your average length of account. If you have two cards for 10 years, your average account age is 10 years. If you open another account, that instantly drops down to 7 years.
That is definitely not true all the time. Chase didn't do a hard credit pull to give me my MileagePlus credit card, which was definitely worth the effort. Besides, the hit from a credit pull is only temporary, so unless you are planning on buying property or changing rentals in the short term, it's basically negligible.
People are a bit too worried about their credit scores. Just make sure to not screw up too badly and you should be mostly OK.
Yeah I understand. I monitor my credit obsessively and have a good idea of what happens to my score in any given scenario. In this case I wanted the additional credit line anyway so it was worth it. I'm still young and at the point where any additional line of credit is a long term benefit for me (decreases utilization percentage, increases number of accounts, increases total number of on-time payments, and long term will increase average age of accounts). Also I like the rewards.
