what's your CL on the cards you do your heavy MS on?

I usually do a few times my CL in a month, as in 3-4x, but I know others are more aggressive. What I do is:

1) scale up gradually with a new card/bank, and get them comfortable with you as a responsible borrower with a non-fraudulent account

2) wait until transactions have posted, then initiate a payment. Yes, it's slower than starting a bill pay from your checking account or WM while an MS transaction is still pending, but you don't lose that much time and it avoids the scenario where something takes longer to post than you expect and you end up with a big credit balance. Which is a big red flag

3) Even if your CL is restored immediately after making the payment (Amex always does this for me) don't take advantage of it to charge more until that payment has cleared your bank. Also, for a card with no pre-set spending limit which has a revolving credit limit, don't ever charge more than your revolving limit (until you have paid off the previous charges), although maybe push things closer to that limit than you would with a regular, non-NPSL card.

4) Always make sure to pay in full before statement cuts to keep your utilization low so you keep your score up and lenders don't freak out when they do a soft pull to check up on you, except one card which you should let close at 5-10% utilization. (Exception - US Bank reports to the bureaus at the beginning of a calendar month, rather than statement balance.)

This has worked well for me and enabled me to hit the good deals fairly hard while avoiding shutdowns. The ability to rotate between different CCs means I don't give up too much in terms of volume, and since all the good offers are concentrated with a few banks it pays to be somewhat risk averse with them (but not so risk averse that you miss out on the deals).

YMMV and all that. It's not in the banks' interest to let you know how much is too much for them. If you do get shut down your card will most likely just be declined one day and they will tell you your accounts are closed when you call to find out why. There will always be some guesswork involved and you can never assume what works for someone else will work for you, or conversely that something that caused AA for one person will do the same for another.

This should be written in stone somewhere. Never, never, NEVER pay a charge before it posts. If everyone followed this piece of advice, we could eliminate countless of "I got shutdown because I had a negative balance" posts.

I do the same. Always wait for the charges to post before paying. Only when the credit line is available again do I start charging the card again.

Haha, sorry, it was late. High five figures.

Darn. I was going to ask you a lot of questions. lol

Wouldn't it be wiser to run a small balance so that a negative is not possible? Then pay off 90% before the statement date.

<<< takes the prize for Most Tautologous Comment Ever.

... and that's true for everything, from car wrecks to cancer. So what?

I've put $30k on a Barclays card with A $3.5k credit limit since January and haven't heard anything and make many payments throughout the billing cycle. I also put some regular spend on the card though. I think it's all YMMV

To be fair to the original comment. . . the person in your example would drive drunk on the weekends and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day.

As was already explained, it meant that posts of the form "I've been doing X x CL and I'm fine" don't really have much value.

Whereas every one of my posts is worth its mass equivalent in zinc.

you make some pretty authoritative and aggressive posts for someone who has been around for 3 months and who, btw, is wrong with your 1 size fits all generalizations based upon your first semester of MS 101.

i have an amex acct i am working with that has carried a negative balance about 90% of the time the past 2 years. sometimes over 30x CL negative. have done several purchases that were 5-10x CL, and one 24x (made possible due to... neg balance). another amex card negative balance about 40% of the time- most about 4x CL. both have large negative balances on statements.

is this extreme? yes
is there danger of a shut down or FR? sure.
is it a sample size of 1? kinda- 1 or 2.
would i advise this to others? no.
is it proof that, as is often, ymmv? obviously
is it worth the risk? depends on one's situation. you're not getting very far MSing $1000 CL. that one card has done over 350,000 in MS the past 2 years. 350x CL. by your 'rules' it would have done what- 24k? 30k tops?worth it? ya think...

the acct had/has a $1,000 CL. so it became a test bed. the only other amex acct held had a 2700 limit. so, there was really nothing to lose.

in fact, one could speculate that with the tiny limit and constant credit balance, amex also has nothing to lose. it's not even a credit card, it's, effectively, a debit card. FR is to protect amex. considering they are basically a bank on this account, their risk is nil. the main issue i've worried about is whether it looks like money laundering. it isn't but, of course, everything in MS looks very much like it. aside from that, is amex really going to FR a $1000 CL? i'd laugh and tell them if anyone should show creditworthiness it's them, since they're often holding so much of my money!

i don't know about other banks, but that is my amex experience. in fact, i posted in the barclays thread about experiences with overpay this week, as there is a new 'arrival' with a low cl and a similar ramp seems on the horizon with them.

btw, would i do it with chase? no. too much to lose.

I have a card with 5K limit. I routinely do 6x - 7x CL. I wait for purchases to post, pay and then buy more.

To you guys running multiples of your CL, are the purchases obvious MS like Amex gift cards or is it more diversified?

only helpful as a data point if you say the card/issuer...