Good question. As far as negative impact, charge card balances do count against your overall debt. Therefore, other lenders may still take your total amount of debt into consideration despite having low utilization. Just to be clear, AMEX also has regular credit cards that do report utilization. In this case, we are talking about their charge cards, Green, Gold, and Platinum.

I have only been at the credit card game since about 2018. In my limited experience the lack of impact on utilization has always been true. I don't know if things were different in the past.

Here is an article that goes into more detail: https://thepointsguy.com/news/how-charge-cards-affect-credit-score/

Charge cards are not without problems, particularly if you are on a plan to pay down debt. First, charge cards don't incentivize you to change your behavior. As you can continue using one with little impact to utilization, you may not reduce your spending, which reduces the amount of free cash flow to pay down credit cards carrying a balance.

Another problem with charge cards is that they require paying off every month. If you have a cash flow crunch that causes you to miss a payment due date, this can affect your credit negatively. This is true of all cards, except that charge cards require payment in full, while credit cards only require the minimum payment. Therefore, you're more likely to get into trouble with a charge card. I've been down that road.

Charge cards aren't good at all for velocity banking, which speeds up how fast you can pay down debt. In my experience, balance transfer cards are the best as they allow you to dump your paycheck onto the card to lower your average daily balance. In this way, you lower your interest cost. Thus, you can pay off the total balance faster.

Ultimately, it may not have been detrimental to avoid charge cards while you were on a debt reduction plan. Although, this is for entirely different reasons than your utilization ratio.

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