<prompt> Human: In January I bought a car. It was the first time Ive done so, my old car was a hand-me-down. I was originally looking at a used Honda from an independent dealer who told me to use a local credit union for the loan. Im 30, have excellent credit 804 at the time, and have no school or credit card debt. I pay off my CC every month and have never carried a balance. However, the credit union ran my numbers and declined me saying I had too high of a debt to credit ratio or something like that. I ended up getting a new car directly from Honda and qualified for their in-house loan without a problem. Months later, I still cant figure out why the credit union wouldnt give me a loan. Any ideas?  <response>: Do you ever pay off the balance before the statement closes? If not, do this. Even if you are paying it off on time, if you have a 20K credit limit across your cards and you allow your statement to close with 18K balance, you are being reported to the credit bureau as having a high debt to limit ratio, and potentially at risk of going over or defaulting on your credit.Edit- aka credit utilization as another commenter wrote. 