The Offer
- Signup for the Capital One Venture and get 60,000 miles when you spend $3,000 within the first three months from card opening.
This offer is available via referral link as well; worth reaching out to friends/family to find out if they have a referral link.
Card Details
- $95 annual fee; fee is not waived the first year
- Card earns 2x points everywhere (the equivalent of 2% everywhere)
- Earns 5x on Uber and UberEATS through January 31, 2021
- No foreign transaction fees
- Visa Signature benefits
Our Verdict
The recent 100k offer just ended, though that one needed $20k in spend, so it wasn’t for everyone. The regular deal on Venture is to get 40,000 ($400), though we’ve seen it go up to 50,000 or even up to 75,000.
Points can be redeemed either as a travel credit to offset $600 in travel costs or you can get gift card redemptions in that amount. You can also transfer the miles to 12 travel partners that Capital One has. Through April 2021, you can also offset dining and streaming charges as well.
If you’re going to apply, it’s worth checking out these Things to Know about Capital One Credit Cards first. Notably, Capital One is known to pull all three credit bureaus for each application. Keep in mind, you can freeze your Experian or Transunion and limit the pulls to just two. Another issue is that they seem to be stricter with approvals than other card issuers, and they may also have a rule to only approve one card per six months (hard pull won’t even be done beyond that).
Hat tip to reader naddi
I was just denied for this card. I’ve never been denied before, and I’m so surprised. I didn’t have a relationship with CapitalOne. I have a credit score around 800, and I’m 2/24. I’m curious to see what the reason is once I receive the rejection letter in the mail.
Is it possible to apply for 2 CapitalOne credit cards on the same day and get approved? I remember reading about people applying for BoA cc’s that way a few years ago? TIA.
Great, they only pulled one Hard Pull for me.
Brooklyn, New York, experian Frozen, they pulled only equifax. Trans Union has no pull.
CL given $25K, score 813. Have no accounts at all with capital one. 2/24
I got an update and they just pulled Trans Union as well…
I see 100k points for $20k spend else 50k points for $3k spend currently… How to get 60k points for $3k spend if I have no family/friend with a referral link? Tried refreshing a few times but did not work…
Finally got approved for Capital Once Venture 60K point offer. They are still tough to work with. I am at 3/24 and have a capital one 360 checking and savings account. They had to run me through their fraud services for some reason. Credit score around 800.
When does this offer ends?
If you redeem points by covering a streaming/dining/travel purchase but that transaction later gets refunded, what happens? Do I get to keep the redeemed points value?
never had any luck with this ol’ gal…tried getting her twice already in the past…have 100k of credit already…dare I try thrice.
Upon reading this news, I called Capitalone and cancelled my Venture card with them — a card that I’ve had for over 12 years and billed over $300,000 with using it. 800+ credit score. I received the annual fee 2 months back and I called to get a retention offer. Nothing. I paid the annual fee and have lightly used the card since. Read this article and felt disgusted that I cannot receive this bonus or any bonus from this company and called the cancel the card. I first asked if any retention offer. Nothing. I feel fine. I’m all in UR points only.
Given that you already paid the AF (and assuming you didn’t get any refund), it would’ve been smarter to just keep it until the next one hits, who knows what offers would pop up..
“Upon reading this news…”
What news? What are you referring to?
Denied. 3 HPs. Got email of reason letter:
Reason 1: “number of bank cards tradelines opened in the last 24 months”
Was 5/24 and 0/12, so nothing too extreme.
Reason 2: “there are too many revolving accounts”
Have 20+ accounts open, maybe 5 reporting a balance (not sure which number is “revolving accounts”).
One card (with 0% APR) has >80% util, so maybe that’s a factor (though people say Cap1 likes to see some carried balance). Scores are high 700s.
I don’t know the real main reason for denial, but they’re probably looking for data that indicates who will use the card long term and not just grab the SUB.
Totally agree. I’m guessing Capital One is probably looking for people who are new to the credit card world so that they can use their credit cards frequently instead of leaving their cards in the drawers after gaining the sign up bonus.
Revolving accounts are things like credit cards. Accounts that are not revolving are typically loans (or more rarely things like auto lease agreements). Whether an account has a positive balance doesn’t determine whether it is revolving.
Of your 20 open accounts, how many were revolving?
You are right that having even one card with a very high utilization hurts your credit score, and some lenders or CC issuers weight that factor even more heavily than FICO does.
It’s credit cards only, no other loans or credit lines. One (0% APR) card is 88% util but overall util is only 2%. That might cost 10 FICO points or so, but it matters more how individual CCCs factor that. Cap1 gave reasons “number of bank cards tradelines opened in the last 24 months” and “there are too many revolving accounts”, so they didn’t seem to refer to the high util card.
OK. So it definitely sounds like the existence of 20 open revolving cards are a problem. It also sounds like they (like Chase’s 5/24)) might look at the existence of number of cards opened in the last 24 months and that (like Chase) last 12 months is not a scoring factor. It would be interesting to me to see if other people could confirm this.
I.e… are there people getting rejected by Cap One with very low total utilization, low individual utilization, FICO scores > 800s, very few cards opened in the last year, but who have 20+ open cards and 5+ cards opened in the last 24 months? There must be a lot of people in that category. It would be interesting to hear their experience.
PS. The existence of a single card (even if you have many more with a zero balance) that is almost completely maxed out can hurt you substantially more than 10 points on FICO. This is been carefully tested by the folks over at the myFICO forums.
I agree with your analysis (including that my datapoint gives some information but unfortunately doesn’t nail any one specific thing down – it is what it is).
Regarding individual util, as an experiment I actually ran that card to exactly 90%, and got a larger score drop, and then next time when it was 88%, the score recovered somewhat (with nothing else notable affecting score, and I’m sorry I don’t remember specific numbers), so this confirms what people say, that there is a notable score drop when individual util is >=90%. It is a dilemma how much to take advantage of 0% APR when high util could adversely affect future applications.
Yeah, the developers and statisticians behind the FICO models do not base their risk assessments solely on what the data itself speaks to. They are very much biased by the fact that they have ten fingers. There’s no reason to believe that a person’s risk jumps substantially at the 90% mark (compared to the 87.4% mark or the 91.3% mark.) Rather it was just easier for them, as a quirk of base ten arithmetic, to arbitrarily set their cutoffs at 90%, 70%, 50%, 30%, and 10% (that last one only applies to total utilization).
I wonder whether 0% APR offers are really worth chasing nowadays, given that interest rates are so low. E.g. suppose Bob has 30k in a high-interest savings account (0.5% annual) He has 20k of unexpected expenses (medical bills, whatever) so he opens a card with a 0% promotion and keeps almost all of the 20k on it the whole year (and then pays it off at day 363). He gets an extra savings of $100 by keeping the 20k in the savings account — which he still has to pay taxes on, so maybe it is closer to $70. It seems like the better choice is to open multiple CCs with big signup bonuses. By putting the 20k on them he can make way more than $100, at least $2000.
I use rewards checking to get 3% interest (it had been 4% a while ago), so it amounts to something.
Good for you. I have a bunch of cash that I am saving for a down payment on a house (eventually) so I opened an HMBradley account to get the 3% rate too. Even still, the financial approach that benefits a person most (as far as I can tell) is to keep spending as low as possible (few to no vacations, restaurants, etc,) and then if a big CC spend is inevitable (medical bills, etc.) use the spend for cards with big signup bonuses. The SUBs seem like they vastly outstrip the benefit of a 0% promotion, as do a few judiciously chosen SUBs for opening bank accounts.
This is in contrast to an era when interest rates were sky high (e.g. late 1970s) and you could get 16% on bonds (or by paying down an expensive mortgage). That’s when a 0% CC offer would have really come into its own.
Anyway, thanks for chatting about all this — it’s been interesting!