Wednesday 26 March 2008

CC application rejected

I got a call from Aussie regarding the credit card application I lodged last week (in order to get a 0% balance transfer). They wanted to "check" on some of the details on my application. We went through my salary income, "other" income (my stock portfolio dividends), debts and expenses. In the end the call center operator told me that my expenses were more than my after-tax income (they're not) and asked me if I wanted to change any of the figures. I explained that the problem was that their calculation of my after-tax income was wrong. Since the interest payments on my stock portfolio loans are tax-deductible, my taxable income and therefore the tax I pay is a lot less than their calculations suggested. This went over like a lead balloon (the operator actually asked "is that legal?" when I gave an indication of my actual taxable income) and they were obviously not going to think beyond the numbers that were getting thrown up on their screen. I could have simply told them to ignore the assets, debt and cash flow figures relating to my stock portfolio (which I've done on previous occasions when the CC application didn't have anywhere to put this sort of info), but in the end I decided to just let them decline my application. I don't really want another CC cluttering up my wallet, and the interest I could earn investing $8,000 of "free" OPM for 6 months isn't a huge amount.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

2 comments:

Futuristics said...

NICE Blog :)

mOOm said...

"is that legal" LOL

I used to shock my friend who works in the Federal Treasury when I told him how little tax I paid. And he ought to know what's possible...