Originally Posted by
S.Marsh
Ouch . . . Were you paying off current balances in-full (and with several payments) before new statements posted or were your statement-balances at the max and being paid off? I'm only asking because I plan on making several charges that are close to the credit-line several times during this billing-cycle. But before I make new charges, I plan on paying off each charged balance in-full to make way for a subsequent charge. I do this all the time with Chase, but if Barclays doesn't allow it, then I guess I should leave those charges with Chase.
What your balance is at the statement close goes on your credit report.
If that is the only card you have, then being close to the max is horrible, because it's very high card utilization.
If you have tons and tons of other cards that you don't use at all, then it's not so bad for card utilization for others.
But a bank may look at card utliization from the standpoint of just the cards you have with them (as well as total), and the OP uses "cards" plural and implies that they had more than one card from Barclays and maxed out each of them.
It might be different if you have several cards with a bank but only max out one of them, than if you have several cards with a bank and max out all of them (despite paying them off in full every month). If the bank's forumula is to look at ulitization percetnage across the account you have with them, maxing out all your cards with them each month looks horrible!
(For this reason, when doing 0% balance transfers, I try to not use up more than about 1/3, maybe close to 1/2 at most, of any particular card's total available credit. That way, no matter whether the bank looks at my total utilization overall, or my total utilization within that bank, or even my utilization on a card-by-card basis, they'll still be happy with me. Perhaps I'm more conservative than I need to be, but I prefer that to ending up like the OP!)
IMHO, if you need to max out one card for a short time to meet a spend threshold for a signup bonus, that's one thing, but if you keep on doing it month in month out for a long time, or on several cards at a time, that's something else.