The only absolute rule in credit is to pay the minimum payment on time, every time. Everything else about credit is merely a choice of how to use credit.
There are some corner cases is scoring where revolving limits that are too high are simply ignored, so they don't help utilization there. The limits you are proposing are plenty adequate and you know about utilization enough to not have a concern there.
If you get an AMEX charge card, Green, Gold or Platinum, then that spend / utilization isn't influenced by a set limit anyhow.
Go ahead and reduce your limits. Another member here closed a number of cards, and took the time to set every limit of the half dozen remaining cards to exactly $20,000, all of them through requests to reduce limits. That probably makes OCD folks purr.
@disdreamin wrote:I wondered how crazy it would be if I contacted my banks and requested lower credit limits on my credit cards. I have a few accounts with Chase and one with AmEx and Citi. I'd like to take advantage of a nice SUB with a new AmEx card some time in the not-too-distant future and was considering requesting my limits on most of my exisiting accounts be lowered but don't know how that might impact future apps.
I don't carry cc balances month to month and usually only have a couple accounts post a statement balance. I'm not overly worried about % utlilization, although every once in a while I don't time payments well and might have a few thousand post - I figure if % util happens to be high for a month it will recover the following month.
Thoughts about this? I'm wondering if there are unintended consequences I haven't considered.
Not crazy at all. I too like SUBs and I lower limits whenever I feel the existing exposure becomes too high that it might impede auto approvals. Not a fan a recon, lol.
Like you I don't carry balances and don't worry much about utilization. I have put on 95%+ utilization on new cards right away to hit minimum spend and just let them all post. Yes it did lower the scores but what's the big deal? They will recover next month. Besides there is always AZEO if the needs arise.
Incidentally I have never requested CLI for any of my cards, ever. Some grew automatically over the years and others never changed, or got lowered by me.
However I do recommend keeping one card with higher limit just in case. For me it is my Capital One QuickSilver at $30K and that's way more than enough.
@NRB525 wrote:The only absolute rule in credit is to pay the minimum payment on time, every time. Everything else about credit is merely a choice of how to use credit.
There are some corner cases is scoring where revolving limits that are too high are simply ignored, so they don't help utilization there. The limits you are proposing are plenty adequate and you know about utilization enough to not have a concern there.
If you get an AMEX charge card, Green, Gold or Platinum, then that spend / utilization isn't influenced by a set limit anyhow.
Go ahead and reduce your limits. Another member here closed a number of cards, and took the time to set every limit of the half dozen remaining cards to exactly $20,000, all of them through requests to reduce limits. That probably makes OCD folks purr.
Banks and CU's love OCD customers 
For those wondering how credit limit history may be displayed on a credit report, here's how one of my Quicksilver cards that took a haircut last year shows on TransUnion:
As for reducing credit lines voluntarily, although I have an obnoxious amount of credit for my income/resources I've never asked for a credit line to be reduced. So far this hasn't caused me any issues.
I can see why some might request a reduction(s), but none of those situations have ever applied to me. What has happened to me in the past was not having a high enough credit limit to handle something that was larger than usual, so I'm hesitant to do anything that would put me back in that position again.
(Note that the high balance on this card of $8.9k was to replace a roof, and only reported for a month. This is a good example of how it can be useful to have enough 'cushion' to make an unexpected large charge even though under normal circumstances I would never need that much all at once.)
