High utilization affects your score. For example, if you have a credit limit of $1,000 and have a balance of $900 when reported to credit agency, your utilization will be 90%. This will negatively impacts your score even if you pay it off on time. It is possible to avoid this by paying off purchases immediately, since your balance is only sent to the credit agencies once per month. Also if your limit was $10,000 the same balance would only be 9% utilization which is a lot better.

Interest or not, you should never carry a balance on a credit card. You should also never have more than 10% utilization.

Looks like you probably did three things which hurt your score… having a new account, carrying a balance, and possibly having more than 10% utilization.

I know the whole credit score thing seems stupid, but if you know how their calculations work you can get a high score in just a few years of doing everything correctly.

I recently was a cabinet seller, and basically 100% of my customers either paid cash or paid on the Lowe’s card to get the 5% discount, then paid it off immediately with a different card.

So, among the population of people doing kitchen renovations, it seems your case is toward the “overextended” end compared to how most people do it.

In your case it was probably just credit utilization ratio that got you. I doubt they’re considering the types of purchases.

Just saying, in my experience at a big box home improvement store, basically everyone who buys cabinets does so with cash on hand.

Everyone has some great points about credit cards in here. Just like to point out that despite how good they are most of you missed the point completely.

If my credit score goes down 50 points for a reported balance, once that balance is paid off, not returning to the original score is simply absurd. It's a penalty just for existing in the system.

Just talking about myself here. The individualist lens, as it were. I worry about collectivist thinking because I don’t like the idea of outliers being trimmed out of the plans. Largely because I’m an outlier.

I’ve read history of what happens when class consciousness is the primary method of thinking. I don’t think I would have done well in the Soviet Union, because I have a powerful compulsion to tell the truth, and people who told the truth there got disappeared.

I had an Uber passenger yesterday who got fucked out of her organization because she told the truth, and the story sounded like something straight out of We The Living.

Consider this: collectivism views the primary moral unit as the class. The class is the body. The class has consciousness.

Well, if you see things that way, then removing a person whose presence doesn’t enhance the class success is no worse than trimming off a fingernail or removing a tumor.

I’m an individualist because I fundamentally believe people are not replaceable, not fungible, and that they should merge their consciousness with others only with the understanding that this erases their individual consciousness.

Sorry to rant. I appreciate the support, but it kinda comes across as recruitment. People find meaning in the military, which is the epitome of collectivist effort. A centrally-controlled structure where nobody owns anything, people go through intense brainwashing to remove their sense of individuality, and typical operations involve determining a person’s capacity to extract as much as possible, and then providing that person according to their need.

And what is the product of this way of organizing humans? Why it’s death, destruction, and generational trauma of course. What else could it be?

Really appreciate it, brother. I know people struggle, for all sorts of reasons. Just please don’t use the word class to entice me. I’m an individual, not an instantiation.