No credit card required
Browse credit cards from a variety of issuers to see if there's a better card for you.
The bottom line is that you're going to be fine.
Scoring based on your overall utilization is likely to be unaffected. You'll probably be dinged for your individual card utilization going over 28.9%. However, some report not being dinged until exceeding 48.9%.
Discover is going to be fine. They're extremely tolerant of people carrying balances with much higher utilization and over much longer periods than you're planning on. Your balance isn't going to be high enough for your other lenders to care about.
At most, you'd probably experience a 3-5 point ding for your individual card utilization landing in the 28.9%-48.9% range. On some profiles, this number would be 0 points.
AA doesn't happen from utilization alone... definitely not from 35% utilization on a single account. I've known people that have rolled with 96%-100% utilization on every card (6-7) they have (98% aggregate utilization) for nearly a year without experiencing AA, so long as they were always making their payments on time every month. Miss 1 payment and all bets are off and it's game on for your lenders to take AA. My point here is that you have absolutely nothing to lose any sleep over. In fact, it would probably be a good time to hit Discover up for a SP CLI. Many people have reported favorable CLI results with their Discover utilization in the 30% range as opposed to single-digit [ideal] utilization.
Nice job, glad to hear you got something!
With Discover, I suggest requesting a CLI every month following your FICO score updating on their site. I went a period of 38 weeks where I requested one every single week, every Monday morning. There's no harm in trying often and on occasion you'll get a better (>$500) CLI which could help your utilization a bit.
Yeah, 6 months is pretty standard with many lenders like Cap One, Citi, Amex, etc. Discover is known to give CLIs out much more frequently. Don't get me wrong, there are people that go 6+ months without getting a Discover CLI. My longest period of time without receiving one (while requesting one very frequently) was 10 months. In fact, I think I'm at about 8 months now. I have to weigh that against periods of time though where I received frequent CLIs, like 4 of them over a 6 month period for example. On my account they've sort of come in waves. The only way I'd know this though is from making frequent requests. If I was only requesting every 3-6 months for example, I would have never received the waves of CLIs that were possible at times.
@Anonymous wrote:At most, you'd probably experience a 3-5 point ding for your individual card utilization landing in the 28.9%-48.9% range. On some profiles, this number would be 0 points.
AA doesn't happen from utilization alone... definitely not from 35% utilization on a single account. I've known people that have rolled with 96%-100% utilization on every card (6-7) they have (98% aggregate utilization) for nearly a year without experiencing AA, so long as they were always making their payments on time every month. Miss 1 payment and all bets are off and it's game on for your lenders to take AA. My point here is that you have absolutely nothing to lose any sleep over. In fact, it would probably be a good time to hit Discover up for a SP CLI. Many people have reported favorable CLI results with their Discover utilization in the 30% range as opposed to single-digit [ideal] utilization.
What does AA mean?