Does having low credit card limits really hurt your score???

[Brandon1972]

I have a Barclaycard with 1300 CL, Capital One unsecured with 500, Capital One secured with 325, Applied Bank with $250, USAA secured with 500, Wal-Mart with 600 and JC Penney with 250. My credit scores are in very low 600's to 630ish. Can anyone set me straight??? Also, CC utilization....is it 7% total util on all cards or each card is best? I've been working on my credit for a couple years now. My score doesn't move that often, probably because I opened too many cards at the same time and most of them are newer credit lines. My oldest card is not even two years yet, so I know that's hurting me as well. Not sure if I'm in the right forum or not because I've been trying to rebuild for a couple years. Maybe this should in the CC forum.

[Jon85]

From what I've gathered from my research from these boards and over the Internet, I've learned (correct me if I'm wrong, anyone), that it doesn't matter what your credit limits are, it's the utilization that's most important.

And also that if you have multiple credit cards, for optimal scoring they should all have a zero balance, except for one, and that one should have less than 10% utilization.

(So each of your cards shouldn't have a balance with only 10% or less utilization, it's your utilization as to your entire credit available from all your revolving accounts.)

[Brandon1972]

Yeah I read that too. From the sounds of it, I need to charge a little something on these low limit cards to keep them active and pay them off before they report. I've also heard to leave say like $5 balance on my Applied Bank with 200 CL and that some minute amount like $5 is the better than 0.