Money Poll #26: Credit Limits
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve run a money poll, but while updating Quicken the night another poll idea hit me… I’m curious as to how much you guys have in available credit. I’m talking here about credit card limits, so simply total up the limits and answer the poll below. For what it’s worth, here’s our situation when it comes to personal credit cards:
Citi Driver’s Edge: $14,100
Citi Dividend Platinum: $10,800
Chase PerfectCard: $10,000
American Express: $5,000
So we could theoretically run up a total of $39,900 in credit card bills. We won’t, but we could.
What about you? I suspect there will be some real whoppers out there, especially amongst those of you that are actively playing the 0% balance transfer game. So let’s get to it…
Disclaimer: Discover is a paid advertiser of this site.
Reasonable efforts are made to maintain accurate information. See the Discover online credit card application for full terms and conditions on offers and rewards.
Modified on April 23rd, 2010 - 28 Comments
Filed under: Credit Cards, Polls
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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28 Responses to “Money Poll #26: Credit Limits”
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The new Discover it card is out to change the way people think about credit cards. No annual fee. No overlimit fee. No foreign transaction fee & no pay-by-phone fee. No late fee on your first late payment. And Discover won't increase your APR for paying late.*
The new Discover it card is out to change the way people think about credit cards. No annual fee. No overlimit fee. No foreign transaction fee & no pay-by-phone fee. No late fee on your first late payment. And Discover won't increase your APR for paying late.*
The new Discover it card is out to change the way people think about credit cards. No annual fee. No overlimit fee. No foreign transaction fee & no pay-by-phone fee. No late fee on your first late payment. And Discover won't increase your APR for paying late.*
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September 5th, 2007 at 11:04 am
$73,000. Yikes. I guess I can go that new BMW I always wanted now
September 5th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
I personally have 9 credit cards, but I don’t know my limit on one of them (the AmEx Business Gold Card) since it supposedly doesn’t have a limit. For the other 8, I have $92,500. Two of the cards have a $25,000 limit each (my two oldest cards). I’m considering canceling two poor performing cards since I’ll never use one of them and I won’t be using the rewards on the other (GM Card). We’ll see.
Yes, I could have alot of fun with my cards if I was dying in a month and had no family to worry about
or should I say 
September 5th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Good luck with the month of credit card fun…if your case was anything like mine, your credit would be pretty immediately flagged for potential fraud, and you would end up spending most of your time removing the flag rather than soaking up the rays on your own private island.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Man, I thought I had a lot of credit card availability at ~$46K. But with 38% (at this point) having more than $50K, I guess I need to step it up and go apply for some more cards!
September 5th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I’d be curious what the average credit limit is. That is, are we getting >$50k because of 5+ credit cards, or do we have several with very large balances.
In my case, I only have 3 credit cards, but they all have limits over $20k.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
We’ve got several at 30 or so grand and a couple regular ones (with better rewards) at 4-6K. The small ones we use and pay every month. The big ones are 0% and sometimes we ride big purchases on those until the 0% is gone and keep the cash in a 5-5.5% MM until then.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Yeah, my cards top out at $100500, which scares the hell out of me, but that’s spread across 6 different cards. The highest limit is $24k, and two others are over $20k as well.
One thing I’ve noticed is that once you start knocking $1000’s off of your balances per month, they increase your limit fast (as well as inch up the rate). I’m pretty sure all of my cards started with a limit hovering around $5k.
Thankfully, 4 of them have a zero balance and I only actually use one of them these days…
September 5th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
$0 – I can’t get credit cards. At least not the conventional kind.
September 5th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
This is odd because I keep a majority of my credit cards in my fire safe cabinet. By chance, I happened to add up my credit limit on all of them and it was actually pretty staggering on how much I had available, haha. With 8 credit cards, I had about 80k+ in credit.
September 5th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Hey Nickel…
I HAVE more than 40K in credit card limits… but I don’t use the cards… So, should I pick option 1 or 40 – 50K? I await your reply…
I think I should go w/ 1, b/c, even though I HAVE the limit, I refuse to use the cc…
NCN
September 5th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
NCN: You make the call…
September 6th, 2007 at 1:14 am
Yeah, I might be over $50k in CC limits, but it’s the utilization rate that’s the key. (Mine is 15-20% and dropping.) That utilization “snapshot” they take for your credit rating had better stay LOW. I’m still not sure if it’s the per-card or cumulative utilization that matters, though.
September 6th, 2007 at 1:32 am
I wonder if it’s worst to have many credit cards or few cards with high credit limits?
September 6th, 2007 at 10:16 am
It’s worse to have many cards with low limits than fewer with high limits.
September 6th, 2007 at 11:04 am
The one we use all the time has a $20K limit. The other three we have between us have $22K. Two of those we’re going to cancel, though, because we just don’t use them.
September 6th, 2007 at 11:26 am
I had to guess what my credit card limits are, because I don’t really know. I’ve never really cared about my limit because I have no plans of going anywhere close to the insane limits on the cards I currently use.
September 6th, 2007 at 11:50 am
I keep three with $10K+ limits, and a charge plate of unlimited balance, but that has to be paid off every month, so theoretically the limit is whatever I have in my savings.
The utilization thing is tricky. I have very low utilization on 2 cards, but very high on one, which was a balance transfer. I am working on it, but it’s slow going.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I have some 20 credit cards with a total limit over $200K. I am thinking of getting a couple of more cards each year if there are good deals. Right now, my utilization ratio is almost 50% because of the balance transfer, yet my credit score is close to 800.
September 8th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
i have about 4 credit cards with $35k in limits. However, this weekend, i plan on procuring an additional $100k in credit limits to stuff into a high yield savings. My global utilization is under 20% so i like my odds. It feels so nice to commiserate with fellow arbitragers!
September 8th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I have two rewards cards with a combined $30,000 limit.
September 9th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
yikes is right. $150k with the highest being one at $30k, three at $20k each. 13% utilization b/c of 0% arbitrage. after the promos end, no more arbitraging for us.
September 10th, 2007 at 12:13 am
I have 8 cards with s combined limit of $181k, but I don’t play the 0% BT game.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:15 am
$346,000 at last tally. If I want to carry just $3,000 in credit card debt , I’m at less than 1% of utilization, which is a beautiful thing.
September 14th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
I have one credit card that I don’t use that has a limit of $12,000. I recently asked BOA to lower my credit limit from $17,000 to $12,000 as it had creeped up. I wonder what the point is of having so much available credit ($50,000+), you wouldn’t be able to use it all before the banks would start flagging for fraud and change in habits, etc. and they would shut you down. Does have a lot of available credit help the FICO score because of low utilization?
September 16th, 2007 at 10:30 am
According to Yodlee… about $330,000 in available credit, $195,000 in balances (60% utilization). There’s a few cards with $0 balance I’ve never set up because I don’t plan to use them ever, so actual utilization might be a bit lower.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
ON MY 3 AVAILABLE CREDIT CARDS ,one with $48,000 limit. Second with $39,000 and third with $38,000.
total BALANCE… zero.
I pay in full each month.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I’m really bad.. I have 36 Credit Cards, total Credit line about 650K. I have played the 0% game with great gains. As the percent of High YSA rates dropping to 3.5%. I’ve decided to relax a bit with this.
The good news – I carry no debt. I use the cards as a free 30 day loan; pay the cards off every month. I use these cards at least every 2 months just for little things that I would normally buy like gas, food, etc. With this many cards you have alot of options.
Note: I couldn’t get a credit card 6-7 yrs ago. I learn to use the FCRA to my advantage. First Goal was to get a CC. Second goal 50K and so on, people will say having to many cards is a bad thing.. (it might be, but I’m not having any issues)
The Gentleman that created this site – http://www.fivecentnickel.com/ has really good knowledge!! (Good guy to learn from)
October 31st, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Wow! I have a $44000 CL between all of my cards. I thought that was a lot but those of you six figure limits have put me to shame. I have six cards and 4 of them were opened to take advantage of 0% offers.