Over the Limit & Utilization

[Anonymous]

I had an over the limit charge on a Chase card (merchant waited over a month to post a large purchase, and I was a bit sloppy and thought I'd used a different card). I immediately paid it down.

I'm trying to bring up my credit score for a home purchase. Chase isn't reporting my credit limit, but it is reporting my high utilization, which is above my limit. Does the FICO formula treat that as my limit? Should I ask Chase to report my limit? Or will the score realize that I either went overbalance or had my limit reduced? 

[llecs]

Which Chase card is it? Some CCs don't report CLs and do go by the highest balance. If the card is over the limit now, a reported CL below the current high balance will harm your score temporarily, or up to the point the balance drops below the reported CL.

[Anonymous]

Its an Amazon.com Visa. The current balance is 0, the highest balance carried is from around September, and is like $300 over the limit. 

Sounds like not reporting that may be buying me an extra $300 in CL.

[haulingthescoreup]

Don't worry about the highest balance. It's not used in scoring unless your card is one of the oddballs that don't report a CL. As long as your card reports a fixed CL, that's just an interesting tidbit for future lenders.

I have a highest balance that's about $1400 higher than the CL on that card, because I moved CL's around with a second card from that bank after that balance hit. There has been no effect on my scores. If any lender ever asks (and none ever had), I'll just tell them at the time I had a $30K CL on that card, and I later moved much of it to the other card. Which I did.

Also, with CCC's these days screaming "Off with their heads" like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, plenty of people will have highest balances that are higher than whatever their current CL's are.

[Anonymous]

It is one of those oddballs with no listed CL.

[haulingthescoreup]

Well, in that case, you did yourself a favor in terms of scoring, I think.

Cards that don't report limits (generally MC World and Visa Signature, although not all of these do this) get their util figured from the highest reported balance. So the higher the balance that reports, the lower the util that will be calculated in the future, as the number in the denominator will be higher.

You might get some sort of penalty from Chase, though.