this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
562 points (95.0% liked)
People Twitter
10229 readers
1319 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician. Archive.is the best way.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My usage is less than 10% my combined credit limits are ~100k my scores are around 800-817 depending where I check. Actually when I went to buy a car 2 years ago I overheard the sales guy and the finance guy who were talking about it say "holy shit, she has really good credit."
Edit to correct my numbers after I looked them up
I didn't say it was the entire score (unless all you have is a credit card).
You can call up the agencies yourself and ask. They will tell you that the optimum is something like ~30% credit utilization. More or less than that will affect your score negatively.
I imagine how big/small that affect is depends on all sorts of other factors.
Edit: It's stupid. Shortly after college, when I had to start paying back student loans, I decided I wanted to try to "build credit," so I got one of the few cards they were willing to give me. My (already not great) credit score immediately dropped.
When I looked into why, I learned about "credit utilization" and why you always want to carry a balance if you want to build your credit.
It's fucking stupid.
You've been saying the same bad advice up and down this thread.
If you reliably pay your credit card bills in full by the due date, your score climbs and climbs. Not instantly, over time. Reliability isn't a one-off.
If you cancel your credit card, you have less evidence that other institutions are happy to lend to you, and your score could go down.
If you apply for a new credit card, your score can go down because that's also what people who are running out of money do, not because your borrowing to limit percentage is low.
The highest credit scores are for people who have been loaned plenty of money, and who always make their payments.
Deliberately causing them to charge you interest just makes you poorer and does not show that you're a good risk to loan to. It's the front door for ballooning debt, and that's what they want none of - people who get declared bankrupt or have other debt interventions are a massive loss to them, and what they want to avoid like the plague.
The bigger impact than credit utilization would be the hard inquiry that they use to determine whether to give you the card as well as the avg age of accounts. Low credit utilization may drop your score an extremely tiny amount (only like 1 or 2 points) but the new inquiry and lowering avg age of accounts is a much bigger impact (tens to dozens of pts drop)
Credit utilization /= carrying a balance. I put most purchases and payments on CCs, pay them off completely every month, and my credit utilization is typically something like 10% without paying a cent in interest, and I have an excellent credit score.
From years and years of first-hand experience, there may be a swing of a couple 10s of points when you get closer to that 30% utilization, but it has nothing to do with whether you are carrying a balance and paying interest. Further, that 20 or 30 points basically background noise when it comes to qualifying for new credit.
People get so fucking hung up on whether this or that will change your score by 15 points and how that signals some grand conspiracy. Open a line of credit or two, use it responsibly to demonstrate that you can manage access to that credit--pay on time and in full--it really is that simple.
I just find it interesting and convoluted, not trying to imply anything about any kind of conspiracy.