Tesco Credit card - Credit utilisation updated?

lucicrisp

I have received a message from ClearScore this morning to advise that my Credit Utilisation rating for my Tesco credit card has been updated. The blurb says: "This means that the credit utilisation of one of your accounts has changed. A credit utilisation rate is the amount of money you owe, divided by your total credit limit. A high utilisation rate could be caused by spending on your credit card and not paying it off. A high utilisation rate could be a sign that you're struggling to manage your finances and lenders would be more likely to consider you a risk." The thing is, it's always paid off in full every month, and this hasn't changed since we got it over 10 years ago. Has anyone else had a similar experience, and is there anything I can do about it? Many thanks!

CliveOfIndia

Ignore it.  If you always pay in full every month then the utilisation percentage is completely irrelevant.  It's only if you're carrying a balance from month to month that it becomes an issue.  The CRAs do like to dish out generic and largely irrelevant "advice" to consumers - it's nothing to worry about.

WillPS

CliveOfIndia said:

Ignore it.  If you always pay in full every month then the utilisation percentage is completely irrelevant.  It's only if you're carrying a balance from month to month that it becomes an issue.  The CRAs do like to dish out generic and largely irrelevant "advice" to consumers - it's nothing to worry about.

As much as I agree the advice on these is a little simplistic, and there is intuitively no actual issue if the OP isn't carrying a balance, the utilisation as reported is still important because that's utilisation which could be considered by actual lender-specific algorithms (which are by their nature pretty arbitrary).

OP, so long as you are confident you would not use it as an opportunity to overspend, I would seek further credit - either as an limit increase from Tesco or as a second card (which you might just put Netflix or something like that on along with a DD to clear in full if you don't actually want to use another card). That way your utilisation will fall.