How many cards should I keep a balance reported ? please help

[pat0812]

I have 4 credit cards

3 regular and 1 amex charge card

i want to buy next month a car and I want to maximize my FICO score

i was told that the best is to have under 9% UTI and have only 1 card report a balance

usually I like to keep one of my 3 regular cards report a balance and have my charge card report 0 because it doesn't count towards UTI

this month for some reason I forgot oti pay off my charge card before the statement cutoff date so I have a balance on it

now my question is should I report My 3 other regular revolving cards as 0 ? This will get me to 0% UTI

Or do I keep 1 regular revolvingcard with a balance and then I will have 2 cards report a balance (1 revolving card and 1 charge card) ?

[daybreakgonesXe]

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@pat0812 wrote:

I have 4 credit cards

3 regular and 1 amex charge card

i want to buy next month a car and I want to maximize my FICO score

i was told that the best is to have under 9% UTI and have only 1 card report a balance

usually I like to keep one of my 3 regular cards report a balance and have my charge card report 0 because it doesn't count towards UTI

this month for some reason I forgot oti pay off my charge card before the statement cutoff date so I have a balance on it

now my question is should I report My 3 other regular revolving cards as 0 ? This will get me to 0% UTI

Or do I keep 1 regular revolvingcard with a balance and then I will have 2 cards report a balance (1 revolving card and 1 charge card) ?

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It's actually better to have some kind of utilization and only 1 card reporting a balance, so it looks like you only have 1 out of 4 monthly payments as opposed to 4 out of 4 monthly payments to make every month!

if you cannot wait long enough for this to happen, I think it would be better FICO score-wise to do the latter: get 1 regular revolving card with a balance and then have 2 cards report a balance. 0% utilization won't give you the max amount of points than if you reported some utilization! also some FICO/FAKO/other scoring models don't consider how many balances you have reporting, but all of them will consider your overall utilization.