Correct if you have 20 credit pulls in the past 7 days you might get denied.

Also keep in mind you have 3 credit reports.

I don't recommend Capital One for many reasons, least of which is they pull all 3 credit reports.

However most banks will pull 1 or 2 reports only.

Apply for Amex they are 99.9% chance of only pulling Experian, the others are a toss up but say Discover pulls your Transunion only. They you apply for Chase they might pull Transunion & Equifax only.

Most of it is luck but you could apply for 3 different credit cards and each one sees 0 recent inquiries.

Also, sometimes when you apply for for two cards with the same bank on the same day they will only do an initial credit pull

No. New accounts take about a month to show up on your credit report. You probably have better odds applying in short succession before that happens.

No, you don't even have to use your credit cards to build credit. In fact the less you spend, the lower your balance, the higher your credit scores.

For the best possible scores just spend $5 a month on one card, and let the others sit with $0 balance.

The cool thing about Chase is any time you pay off your balance to $0 they'll update your credit reports.

You don't want everything to report $0 because it'll actually drop your scores, but if you let a few cards report $0 it'll boost your scores.

If you pay your hotel or car rental with a credit card they won't even run a credit check.

The main thing is to watch your spending and pay your credit cards in full every month. In fact if you rarely use your cards you might find that you don't look at your statements too often and end up getting hit with late payment fees for unexpected charges.

A dividend is basically a forced sale of a stock. If a bank gives you 6% interest on your deposit you have your initial deposit plus your 6% yearly interest. With a dividend you end up with the stock price minus the dividend.

> $2,000. Buy around 100 or so shares of Union Bankshares, Inc. (one of the "high dividend" stocks from this Yahoo article) for example. It says the quarterly yield on these shares amounts to around 6.41%

Let me illustrate. You invest $2000 stock and then they pay out 6.5% dividend ($130). Now you have $1870 stock and $130 of dividend. By default meaning you end up with $2000 stock exactly where you started, but it gets better! Now you have pay taxes on the $130 dividend.

I'm not saying to avoid stocks that pay dividend, it just isn't something you should seek out.

I would hope they are using it to just show you the best coverage for that scenario. It should not impact your payment at all, if anything what I would do is answer no regardless and read the coverage to understand what is best for your needs.