Last night I took a look at my Credit Card Snowball strategy and came to the conclusion that there must be a better way to organize this debt.

Originally, I had told myself that I was not going to do anymore balance transfers, or open any more cards for transfer purposes, since it’s just becoming a way of deferring the debt responsibility.

However, my payments to my MBNA debt are being eaten by my rate, which is a generous (yes, I’m being sarcastic) 22.45%. As mentioned, I have an American Express card and being a member since 2003 I’ve decided that I’m going to test their former marketing campaign and see if membership really does have it’s privileges.

Now, I have read countless transfer/talk to your credit card company strategies in both books and blogs, but last night was my first attempt at trying to negotiate with my credit card. I called their customer service department and mentioned that I currently had a large balance at MBNA that I would like to move over to my current AmEx card – however it was about $13,000 and I only had an available balance of about $6,000 on my AmEx.

They told me that the most they could do was raise my credit limit to $14,000 – giving my about $12,000 for the balance transfer.

I then mentioned that my current AmEx balance is due to a previous balance transfer offer that they extended me which held a rate of 4.99% for the life of the balance. To which they informed me that they currently do not have any promotions like that, but they will have one coming up in about a week or so (their promotions run quarterly).

So, I will continue to make the payments on both my AmEx and MBNA debt. I plan to call AmEx back in about a week and if I’m not happy with the rate I’m given on transfers I will ask to speak to a supervisor.

Hopefully, AmEx will not only value me as a customer, but will also appreciate the idea that I would like to unload about $13,000 on them rather than their competitor.

If I can lower the rate on my largest balance from 22% to around 5% – that will obviously be huge.

As always – I will keep you posted.