UTILIZATION and ON-TIME payments are key factors in keep your scores high and your credit clean. Yes, you can have too much open credit, but when you only have ONE card ?? The 'too much open credit' refusal crap most often comes to people who have LOTS of credit cards with generous limits. Makes creditors nervous to think you might end up using even 50-60% of it under those conditions - you become a risk.

Paying off credit cards, in full, every month is, in general a good idea, BUT, there's a downside to it as far as creditors are concerned. People who do that, while it should be a good practice, get labled as 'freeloaders' because the creditor can't make any money off the finance charges !! Creditors make their profits off of finance charges, so they WANT you to be strangling with debt and keep paying those charges ! Creditors will find ways to penalize 'freeloaders' too, they'll add penalties for paying off the card or contrive some other method to milk you of money. They did this to my mother, who always paid her bills off every month. So, pay off 99% of it every month, and leave a LITTLE bit unpaid, not enough to hike your utilization or get you into any trouble.

Its a game, a HUGE game, and the creditors are slavering hoping that your wife will go out and charge up 10K worth of debt to pad THEIR bottom lines.

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