A quick search of the archives shows a whole lot of questions dealing with your credit report, and how credit cards affect your credit rating, but I’m asking a slightly different question.
I don’t care* about my credit rating, and I don’t care about other people loaning me money. What I care about is what goes into the creditor’s decision to increase your balance.
The posts that I’ve read suggest anecdotally that if you keep a low balance and pay it off every month that they will keep raising your limit. However a quick survey of my friends shows that more often than not, when they were pushing their credit limit the issuer came in and up’d the limit tremendously.
So hypothetically, what would be the fastest way to increase your credit limit, to use what they give you so they’ll give you more to collect interest on, or to not use what they gave you and convince them that you’re responsible no matter how much they tempt you with.
*Don’t everybody jump down my throat and lecture on and on about how important my credit rating is to my future, and how an increase in limit and therefore debt will only hurt me in the long run. I know this, I have an impeccable credit rating, and rarely carry anything more than a small balance from month to month. I’m just curious about which of the two options, (or maybe a mix of both) would make the creditors throw a bigger limit my way.
I know this isn’t directly responsive to your question, but if you call them and ask, more likely than not they’ll raise your limit. I imagine that you could get your limit pretty high quicker if you made a call every month or two.
Didn’t read the previous link, but my guess would be if you want to increase your credit limit as fast as possible, you would max out your limit every month and then pay it off every month.
They may want a n outstanding balance to make their money, but they probably figure they will get you sooner or later.
I have come close to doing this on a regular basis (for months in a row) and my credit card company keeps raising my available credit, even though I’ve never requested an increase.
They tell me in a letter what a good customer i’ve been.
Since you don’t want a lecture, use it to the max and pay it off and they’ll give enough credit to hook you. It won’t take that long–depending on how old your history is.
Calling & asking helps. Also,in my experience- (I worked up to a $30-40,000 limit on a VISA ,while others never or hardly ever increased) the way I did it was charge a lot, & pay a little, but always on time. They figure you need the credit & are worth the risk. They are not being nice, just want your money. No, no lecture.
Similarly to iamamoocher my limits almost always get raised after having put on a large balance, letting most of it ride a month, and then paying it off completely*. I guess the company thinks I transferred the balance and the higher limit may entice me to come back. These days, though, it’s all about the airline mileage.
I usually pay off completely every month, but sometimes I’ll let a large purchase ride it out a bit. Everyone says this is bad for your credit report because credit companies only make money if you carry a balance. Okay, that part’s true, but credit companies don’t control the credit reporting companies, so a lower debt-to-availability ratio is a good thing on a credit report, as long as you don’t have too much unused credit. Too much unused credit is the worst thing contributing to my FICO score according to Equifax. Even that’s not too bad, as my FICO is sufficiently high that I never have a problem getting cheap credit. The hardest part of getting credit now? I was a credit fraud victim, so I have fraud alerts on my accounts, which is an inconvenience when I don’t answer “unknown” calls at home.
