Nature's Way of telling you that it's time to renew is unsolicited letters from W5IY and ARRL, offering to act as your renewal agent for one low, low price.
And Uncle Charlie will
give you a CORES/ULS password without even putting a human in the loop. So it's a quick-turnaround process as well as free.
(Once upon a time the password was snail mailed to you, so in theory you had to wait for the envelope to appear before you could apply for a vanity call online. Although back in '03 a very knowledgeable help line guy in Gettysburg was willing to do a temporary password reset for me, so I could file by credit card on the very day my license appeared in ULS).
Too bad my vanity call came up for renewal before the FCC stopped charging for vanity renewals.