What makes this worse is because as I’ve gone from 50% to 95% utilization (despite paying off a large part of my balance – they just decrease limits more), this lowers my score, and caused my credit card rates to go from 10-20% to 25-30%, and making it hard to refinance or get a balance transfer.

I’ve really learned my lesson on how fickle credit card companies can be.

With Shell, I drove so much and charged so much (and paid in full every month) they renigged on their 5% deal. In other words, since I didn’t get behind and pay their 25% interest, they didn’t want to honor their offer. So I don’t buy Shell anymore, and I quit using their card.

I have 4 cards with Chase Bank, again, to get deals on BP gasoline, Amazon purchases, Continental miles, etc.

Then I get this note on a credit report that I have too many cards. So I should shut off some of the inactive ones? But how many is the right number? These credit reporting “services” are morons. They don’t provide any definitive information to the consumer as to what steps the consumer can take to improve their credit score. What’s reallty great is how simplistic their whippy-dippy computer systems are, but they are full of themselves on how great they are. Like Lily Tomlin when she used to do her Ernistine, the phone company operator skits.

I consider these credit reporting agencies to be major players in the great underbelly of the banking system in this country. If the administration had any guts they would include in their “credit card reforms” (LOL) some hard and fast rules for these guys to abide by…like that for any bad or negative report they put in their system, they should have to immediately give the consumer a complete report including contact information either to one of their staff or to the company that posted negative information so responsible consumers can get things straightened out ASAP, instead of having to spend hours doing detective work to figure out what’s up. But no, they try to rip off consumers with the “FreeCreditReports.com” scam where you get your FREE reports if you pay $10 a month for what should be free.

The other thing that really steams me is that individuals do have some Federal laws to help to force the morons to fix their errors. But a small business has no such protection. The morons at one of these outfits attached some other company’s bill defaultsto my company’s record. When I tried to get that matter straightened out the arrogant astards wouldn’t lift a finger to fix THEIR error. It took me a year and dozens of calls to get these creeps to fix their mistake. They should all be taken out and horse-whipped.

I have never had a problem with paying off my cards in full negatively affecting my credit. But if you are concerned with that, just leave them paid off for a year, then run some small balances on them and compare your FICO score before and after. In my experience the score goes down the more debt there is on the credit cards though, so an active card with a zero balance should be no problem.

I hypothesized that having an interest charge on the account would make me attractive to them as a balance transfer customer, probably because it marked me as a “sucker’ or good customer who would rack up purchase rate interest over my balance transfer interest. It seems I was right, as I would always get more attractive offers from them the month after the finance charge showed on my bill. In fact what I then would do was I would first pay off the full balance, not make any more regular purchases, and just use the balance transfer offer (if it was a good deal) for what it was worth to reduce the overall cost of my outstanding debts.

Now of course my finances are on sounder footing and I have little to no need for such shenanigans. But depending on one’s debt situation, after knowing how to budget and use cash envelopes, I think it is a good trick to have in one’s arsenal.