@longtimelurker wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I didn't start getting higher limits until I managed to grow existing cards. Anecdotally, it at least implies that having high limits begets other high limits. If having a high limit is important to you, you might try Amex (3x CLI) or one of the cards that are known to give high starting limits. However, I've also noticed that my existing limits have little to do with CLIs, so there is some mixed news in there.
But the confouding factor is that perhaps you could grow your cards because your report improved (even because some accounts became older), and as your report improved, your new cards got higher limits.
I think it's possible that the converse is true, a bank that would otherwise give you say a $10K limit sees you only have $1K cards, and so gives you less, but I just don't see how a UW that thinks that $2K is right, will give you $10K because you have other $10K cards. They don't know the circumstances of those decisions by other creditors (perhaps the report was much better then) and they probably don't anyway want to take a risk just because Bank X appears to have done so.
Yep, virtually impossible to disambiguate whether it's high limits begetting other high limits, or just multiple lenders responding similarly to the same factors on your reports.
My personal hunch is that it's a little of column A, a little of column B... I suspect there are lenders that don't like to be the first one to give you a longer leash, so to speak. And that makes some sense to me, given that I've known some people who did a fine job managing their credit when they only had a few cards with very low limits, but let things get out of control when limits were raised and they felt like they had more breathing room--it does happen, unfortunately. Other lenders might see granting higher limits as a way of gaining loyalty and encouraging you to put more spend on the card. But it could also be that they're all (or mostly) independent of one another, and we can't really tell the difference.
