What happens if I max out a few credit cards?

[EW800]

I agree that a CLD of others is not a given.  My experience is that you could get lucky and the others don't even notice right away.  Some do AR SP's more often than others.  As an example, I have a couple of cards that seem to only do AR SP's every couple or few months, and then there is Capital One who seems to AR me constantly.   Then it would be a matter of how they interpret what they are seeing.  When my wife and I went through some real ugly financial times just over three years ago, despite very high Util, a credit card settle and a foreclosure, Amex is the only one that balance chased us down (very quickly recovered the CL's a year later), while all of the others completely left us alone.  I was surprised, however I assume it was because I did not have any lates and paid more than the minimum with them.  

[Anonymous]

Hi DantGwyrdd.  For sure, a credit limit decrease is not a given.  It's unlikely in fact.  But it is a possibility (if low) and should be guarded against.  Given that the OP sees this as a short term need (he plans to go up very quickly and then pay off the debt four months later) he should be fine if he adds a couple additional steps.  (1)  Get close to maxxing out the cards, but don't quite do it.  (2)  Always pay more than the minimum payment (possibly just a little more).

Those should be easy to do while still achieving the thing he wants which is to squeeze out almost all the juice in his available credit and avoid paying back much more than he has to for 4-5 months.

[takeshi74]

It really all depends on one's credit profile and the specific creditor's aversion to risk. It's possible that none may CLD. It's possible that one may CLD. With a score of 790 it seems unlikely but what score is that? You don't have just one score. For any scoring model you'll typically have a score with each CRA.

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@Anonymous wrote:

Will the other cards that I have decrease my limit even though I would be paying atleast the minimum payments?

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The minimum only matters for keeping your accounts current. You'd need to look at the impact to your revolving utilization and consider that there's an adidtional hit for maxing each card on top of the high utilization.

[Anonymous]

In our OP's case, I am pretty sure that there is no need to worry about how much his scores will go down, since this whole thing will last at most five months (from first purchase to all cards being paid off).  What he does need to watch is the (probably low) risk of a CLD (credit limit decrease).  A CLD could occur in part because of a score drop, but the drop alone is not a problem.

I can't prove this, but it seems immensely plausible that both FICO and a given CCC will treat a person who is pretty close to being maxed out but still has some available credit (e.g. < 95% of his limit) to be a different risk level than someone who has crossed over into 100% maxxed out -- especially if our OP is coupling that with always paying more than the minimum.  Red flags for risk include people who ONLY pay the minimum or who are truly maxed out on any of their CC's.  Our OP can control both of those things easily, so he should.

A key question would be whether our OP has ever made a late payment or has any other kind of negative data like that on his credit profile.  If not, and he adopts a few easy steps, he'll be managing the probability of a CLD quite well.  And as another commenter observed, even if a CLD does occur, the original CL could be resored once he displays his good behavior of paying the entire debt off in a short time.