General CLI Questions

[kerplunk]

I have six credit cards and one charge card. I just received a CLI on my Discover card and the CL is around $30,000 now. I use the card maybe once or twice a month on small purchases and that's all.

Is there any downside to continue to get CLIs for this account? Any negative consequences for my other cards which are in the $10-20k range? My most premium card (Chase Sapphire Reserve) is only at $20,000 CL.

Will my other cards potentially have their CLs reduced? Any other negative consequences you can think of?

Sorry if this has been answered before. My credit scores are around 830 currently.

[Anonymous]

     Assuming you did not have a hard pull (I wouldn’t think so since you didn’t ask for the increase) and you seem to be responsible with using the credit you have, there is only one negative factor I can think of. Depending on your other cards, some lenders look at your total credit limit (the combined limits on all your cards). They may place a maximum combined credit limit value for you; however, this usually depends on your income, history and length of credit with them. It also may depend on your total length of time on all your cards.

     This last point means that if your cards are new (usually under a year) or you received a large number of new cards in a relatively short period of time (3 to 6 months) then an individual lending review officer may see that as a negative factor beyond the AAoA and inquiry hits. If any of these factors are true and you have such a credit card lender, then you may see them either lower your credit limit on THEIR card or close that account outright. I only know of one lender that I have heard of that does that.

Y

[Anonymous]

When a credit card's CL crosses over 34.9k, certain very old scoring models (e.g. the EX mortgage score) will drop the tradeline from your total credit limit.

More recent models (like FICO 8, which is still pretty old) have a higher threshold for dropping a card due to high CL.  Some extensive testing was done here on the forums and it appeared to be somewhere over 51k.  (Possibly as high as 60k or so.)

A good question to my mind is why you would want a CL higher than 30k on a card that always has a balance of under $1000.  (Based on how you describe it, the balances might be closer to a couple hundred.)

Do you find that your total utilization (all cards combined) has been exceeding 8.99% much of the time?