Credit Card With No Pre-Set Limit May Not Be A Good Choice For You

I recently received a notice from Citibank regarding upgrading my Dividend Platinum card to Dividend World MasterCard. Among the changes that come along with the new card, the No Pre-Set Spending Limit is one features I dont have with any of my existing cards.

At first, I thought its pretty cool to have a card that doesnt have a spending limit (though the notice says No pre-set spending limit does not mean unlimited spending). But later, a question came up: how a no-limit card will affect my credit score?

With other cards that do have a credit limit, the credit utilization ratio (the ratio between used credit and the total credit) accounts about 30% in the calculation of credit scores, according to myFICO. However, if its a card with no limit, then there will be no utilization ratio. Suppose I charge $10 on the card, what the ratio would be? What if I charge $10,000?

I then did a search and found this article, Credit cards that hurt your credit score, on Bankrate.com. Though the article is more than one year old, it explains how credit score could be affected by the no-limit cards. And it turns out that the idea of having a no-limit card isnt really as cool as it appears because

if the card has no limit, the credit-scoring company cant make the credit-utilization calculation, and that has an impact on credit scores.

I am fine if the card doesnt have an impact on credit scores, but what really happens could be that I only have a $10 credit limit as oppose to no-limit and if I make a $10 charge on the card, I could end up with a utilization ratio of 100%. Heres why:

credit card companies that offer no-preset-limit cards will, typically, allow credit-scoring companies to use the highest balance in place of the limit to calculate your credit utilization. So, if the cardholder has a $20,000 balance one month, that becomes the limit used for credit utilization.

So the card could have no impact on total credit line ($10), but could be a big negative on credit score (100% utilization ratio). The article offers two ways to deal with no-limit card:

1. Run a huge charge on the card, thus, if the card company indeed reports the highest balance as credit limit, that will be the credit limit; or
2. Close the account for good.

The first one could be done with a 0% balance transfer which I assume I will get with the new card. However, since Citi is now charging 3% fee on balance transfer, the arbitrage is not as profitable as before. I can still do it for the sake of getting a higher limit. The problem is, from the article, Citi doesnt seem to always report the high balance as credit limit.

Actually, since Citi revised Dividend cards reward policy last year, mine has been sitting in the drawer collecting dust. I have no plan to put the card back into my wallet, therefore, I may just cancel the card, which was opened in 2002, and move the $13,000 credit line to the UPromise card. Another reason to close the card is there will be a new account number on the World MasterCard when it arrives, essentially terminates the old card anyway.

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