Credit card increase

[Anonymous]

I was wondering why the credit simulator on Myfico shows that my score would go down if I would get a credit increase on a card.
I am thinking about asking for a increase on my Walmart card. All my scores are in the low 700's.
I am about to get get a mortgage on a new house in 4-6 months (been pre approved) but don't want to take a credit hit.
Any help would be great.

[Anonymous]

The simulator probably believes that asking for a credit limit increase will involve a hard inquiry.  That is true for some issuers and not for others.  This link is a good guide for which issuers do hard pulls:

https://www.doctorofcredit.com/credit-cards/which-credit-card-companies-do-a-hard-pull-for-a-credit-...

It looks to me reading it that Walmart does not do a hard pull.

Assuming that there is no hard inquiry, then a CLI could not hurt your score.  There's a weird exception which is if the CLI took your credit limit to some wildly high level, like 50k.  That could cause the card's limit to be taken completely out of your utilization calculation.  But that isn't gonna happen with a Walmart card.

[Anonymous]

CreditGuy - is that 50K number for one card or total available credit on all cards? My Amex is due for another increase in December which would put it up over $50K.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

CreditGuy - is that 50K number for one card or total available credit on all cards? My Amex is due for another increase in December which would put it up over $50K.

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That's just for a single card.  If you had ten cards each with a 30k credit limit (for example) then you would have a 300k total credit limit.  If you had two cards, however, with limits of $1000 and $10,000 and then the 10k card had its limit raised to 100k, it would be dropped from your utilization calculation, and if the other card had a high utilization on it, your total util would go through the roof.

This is a weird corner case that in practice almost never comes up.

[Anonymous]

OK thank you. That makes it much clearer. I should be all set since if the Amex dropped out right now, I'd still have $30K in limits and I never carry a balance nor does more than $1K ever report at one time.

[Anonymous]

Wally is a SP. Got 5k on chat last week with no HP reporting.