Meet the credit-card king with $300,000 in credit

[Anonymous]

I found the comments especially entertaining.

from Marketwatch:

Jennifer Waters's Consumer Confidential

June 20, 2011

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/meet-the-credit-card-king-with-300000-in-credit-2011-06-20?siteid=n...

[vanillabean]

A most entertaining story!

PS: two quotes from the article:

"If you have $300,000 in available credit and carried a $30,000 balance, your utilization rate is 10%".

"... to carry a balance that you must then pay interest fees on each month."

So effectively the columnist is saying you need to pay interest to have a positive utilization rate!

That's probably not what she means.

[haulingthescoreup]

Amazing how many personal finance writers have no clue how this works!

[p-]

“You don’t need a lot of credit cards to have a good utilization rate,” said Barry Paperno, consumer operations manager for myfico.com, the consumer arm of credit-scorer FICO. “And obtaining 25 credit cards for your score is overkill. Utilization looks at percentages more than dollars.”

heh heh

[wmarat]

If he is a king, who I am?

$400000 in available credit.

[GregB]

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@wmarat wrote:

If he is a king, who I am?

$400000 in available credit.

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And hopefully, you don't need 25 CC to get there. They stated his average CC limit was only $12K. That is hardly the king, or even a prince.

[vanillabean]

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@GregB wrote:

And hopefully, you don't need 25 CC to get there. They stated his average CC limit was only $12K. That is hardly the king, or even a prince.

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How does the AAoA fit in here though? Does a high AAoA make the average of credit limits look better or worse? FICO prefers the AAoA to be higher, but when so, doesn't that mean you started out with lower credit limits, which got higher by means of increases, which, perhaps more often than not, may have been automatic? If so, how does that reflect the perception of your average of credit limits? And what about the credit card holder, who is not willing to build up hard inquiries to increase the credit limits for those cards that are sparse in handing out automatic limit increases? You can also apply a weight factor to various types of cards; signature cards probably come with higher limits than Amex and Discover cards. It seems to me that there's a captivating formula waiting to be born here!