What's best way to manage util when 9% is not an option?

[tcbofade]

Assuming that your monthly cash flow is fine, I would keep two cards completely paid off, and spread the balances as evenly as possible among the remaining cards.

[mauve]

I've also heard advice here to have less than 50% of your cards reporting a balance - like, if you have 7 cards, don't let more than 3 report a balance.

I've flirted with 90% utilization on a single card and not had an issue with balance chasing. I would see what I could do about CLIs on all of your cards, provided you don't need a hard pull for them.

[ztnjpv]

Yes. Keep the balance on one or two cards....maybe three to keep one card from going too high,

However, there are some solutions to consider:

1. Get a small personal loan and move the balances off the cards. We often think in terms of CC's so often that we forget this other financial prodct.

2. Before your report goes down any more or reports more balances, get a new 0% card with a long intro period to at least save on interest. 

Otherwise, I wouldn't worry too much if you have no plans for more credit. The nice thing about utlilization issues is that they fix themselves instantly when the balances go down. 

[Gunnar419]

Thank you guys for all the smart and helpful responses. I've decided to split the difference. Thinking about what you all have said I'm going to let the util spread over three cards. One card will top out at 50%, another below 30%, and the third will go temporarily to 60%. But that last one is a very low CL card, so I can get it back under 50% just by paying $100 or so. The other four will report 0% so there's no chance of my looking desperate.

I was glad to hear from people who had run single cards to 70 or 80 or 90% without any AA. I'll keep that in mind.

Yes, I had gotten way too concerned about keeping my score up and too  scared of AA. I already knew that Discover, the card that will have the lions share of the debt, didn't give a damn if I carried I high balance. I was worried about Amex Or Barclays seeing what was on Discover and having a panic attack. I realize I was the one having the panic attack.

@young, I already took whatever CLIs I was eligible for right before I started running up the balances. I'm looking forward to that helping my score rise faster once I start paying this new debt off. It'll probably be a year or eighteen months before it's all gone, but I feel more confident about managing it now.

[Gunnar419]

This bit almost belongs in the understanding FICO scoring section, although I'm beginning to think only a professional psychic could understand FICO scoring.

As to the impact of spreading debt around versus concentrating it onto a few cards, this month I've had 6 of the 7 cards reporting balances, mostly small ones. That's not usual and is being remedied. Today I got a SW alert. My EQ score rose from 729 to 747, and the only reason for it was that two cards reported new $0 balances and one of the two reported a little auto-CLI. Those two cards had a total of $80 on them. This change effected my utilization hardly at all but I got an 18 point bump out of it. It makes no sense, except that it's more support for the idea that having a lot of cards reporting has a big impact even when what they're reporting is nearly nothing.

It will be interesting to see what happens when only three cards are reporting but util increases by 10%.