Denied for Cap One CLI. Usage too high, then Usage too low. Swung too hard the other way?

[Anonymous]

I've been stuck with my credit limits too at Cap1 for going on three or four years. My DH was one of the lucky ones to have had his Cap1 secured card graduate to a QS1 while my secure card stayed ... secured forever! My Venture was upgraded from Platium to QS to Venture. I'm at the max on my secure so they will not give me anymore CLIs. My Cap1s are my oldest self cards. I keep getting the same 'low credit usage' CLIs denials (on Venture) and for the last few months they were right as I was carrying a negative balance (that I was surprised that they never return back to my bank). I just started using the card again. I'm going to max the card for a couple of months (and pay it off) to see if I'll finally get a CLI. 

[Curious_George2]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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The only denial reason I'm still getting is the same as yours: "Recent use of this account's existing credit line has been too low."  I'm taking that at face value and pushing the balance up as high as I can without incurring interest charges. I don't mind letting a balance report. I don't have the exact numbers available, but so far I think I have peaked at around 30% of CL and that hasn't changed their mind.

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Thanks! Yeah, we shall see what responses I get. Always interesting to see how people's experiences differ (or not) from one's own. Interesting to see if you letting them report balances changes anything versus what I'm getting of using it more but still paying it off. 

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I made that denial reason disappear by driving my utilization on this card up to 68% in between statements.  Earlier, 43% hadn't been enough.  So, it looks like they want something around 50% (but that's just a guess; it could be as high as 68%) at some point in the cycle.  They might also want something to report on the statements, but I'm not in a position to test that other than to say my highest recent statement Util was 31%.   

Unfortunately for me, I still can't get a CLI out of them.  I'm playing whack-a-mole with their denial reasons.  "Your financial obligations reported to us by the credit reporting agency are too high" popped back up this month, even though my aggregate Util is dropping.  Le sigh.  This might be a complaint about number of revolvers with balances (69% for me now), which I can fix.  If they mean installment loans too, I'm stuck.  A third possibility is that their tolerance for aggregate Util is lower now than it was a month ago (hi COVID).  More testing to come.

[Curious_George2]

I finally got a CLI from Capital One, but it was tiny and disappointing. $400. It is the smallest CLI I have ever received, both in raw dollars and percentage terms. 

Griping aside, on the question of whether they want to see us demonstrate usage by attaining a high mid-cycle balance or a high statement balance, I can't really tell.  They stopped complaining about my low usage after I hit 68% on this card mid-cycle, but they still denied me for a different reason (total revolving debt).  My CLI approval followed a statement period in which my peak mid-cycle Util on this card was 68%, and the statement cut at 47%. I can't tell if they changed their mind because of that statement or because they did a new SP of my credit and saw that my Aggregate Util was down from 26% to 17%. I'm guessing it was the latter. I'll nail that down eventually and try to remember to report back.

I enjoy wrestling with puzzles, and in some ways this experience was good sport. But I think I'm done with begging Capital One for CLI's. [edited here to snip off sentence fragment I didn't mean to include]