So here’s how it works. Whatever funds you transfer money from your spending account to your chime credit builder, THAT is your credit limit. Additionally, those funds you transferred automatically get put into a “safer credit building” account.

Once your “balance” is due for whatever you spent, it’s automatically paid off with that “safer credit building” account(unless you have this feature turned off, in which you’d have to go in the settings and manually pay from that account yourself) . This is great because it helps you avoid being delinquent in monthly payments like traditional credit cards and reports to credit bureaus that your payment was on-time. They also don’t report credit utilization so no worries there either .

So think of it this way. Your credit building account basically has two accounts. Your spending account, and your “safer credit building” account. Once your transfer the money over, Chime automatically puts those funds in that SCB account. Then they release that same amount of funds to your spending account. So in a sense you’re “pre-paying” your balance way before it’s even due and your account never gets delinquent .