Utilisation Ratio

sultanoflondon

Thought I'd provide an update, in case anyone is interested…

In June, I had literally no BT offers for my cards and so I've had to make some repayments on my credit cards, and sadly reduce the balance that I have accumulated over time. Even in July, when I checked again, there was one card, from a provider I've never heard of, which was offering a 0% period of 6 months, which isn't worth the hassle, nor the fee that came with it.

CreditKarma says that my issue is my high utilisation ratio, which is at odds with what we've discussed on this forum. I must say though, I have observed that my offers have always been worse, after I chose to use more than 50% of my credit limit on any given card. Perhaps that's confirmation bias.

Looks like I shall simply need to repay my credit cards until I see a good offer again. In the meantime, I have a decent Virgin card that I'm able to use for Purchases, but I'm coming to the end of that balance soon. The main trick that I have up my sleeve at the moment is that one of my Lloyds cards has come to the end of it's 0% period, and I've repaid it in full. Now, this (large-ish) credit limit can be moved to my other Lloyds credit card (which is currently 85% used), which has a 0% Purchases limit until September 2027. I'll probably use that until c. 50% utilisation ratio, and then check what my offers are looking like at that stage.

Keen to get the forum's thoughts. Cheers all

WYSPECIAL

CreditKarma is not a lender so what they say is of no consequence.

I tend to find it goes in cycles, no offers for a while then suddenly several offers at once.

Just accept that sometimes you have to pay some of the money back.

Altior

I'm not convinced that utilisation has much of an impact at all. It is an easy stat for the CRAs to peddle as part of their implied scoring. One of their MOs to attract members into logging in is to have scores fluctuating.

It's a typical pattern in my experience that stoozers hit a 'wall'. So a stoozing pot has a whipsaw effect, rather than staying relatively consistent. Part of that of course is lenders' appetite to lend, which can also be cyclical.

Nasqueron

I have say 35% on my Barclays, paid last month when it was showing offers, this month none.

NatWest I had an offer last month, card is zero anyway and no offer this month.