3 Questions on raising score:

[UtahTiger]

3 Questions: 

#1 If I have to leave one debt on my report does it matter if it is a retail account or bank credit card account?

#2 I have a Home Depot debt of $9K with a limit of $9,500,  Is it better to have the one home depot account OR the HD account payed down to 4K and my 10K limit credit card with a 5K balance?

#3 How much do you think my score will go up if I pay the total balances down from $28K to $10k next month.  My total Credit limit is $68K.

[llecs]

Welcome to the forums!

I'm going to move your post over to Understanding FICO Scoring in a sec, but to answer your questions...

1) I don't know. My revolving balances will report less than 1% in a week or so and I thought about that myself. My gut tells me that it is best to leave your last balance on a revolving. IME, a revolving CC carried a bit more weight than a store card. You can always experiment the following month by getting the revolving to report $0 and the store a small balance.

2) No difference. You wouldn't start seeing the large score gains until all CC util creeps below 30% or so.

3) YMMV based on how many report $0, but 20-30 points or so could be expected. Just a guess.

It's always YMMV when it comes to guessing. There are many factors that play into this like scoring buckets, report details, mix of credit, and so on.

[UtahTiger]

If my score jumps 20-30 pts next month I will be a happy camper!  Thanks you for the feedback.  I can't wait to start reading all the threads and figuring out what all this stuff means.  Scoring Buckets??? lol  YMMV...I am sure it is an acronym for "sixes" or something like that.

[honeybunnygal]

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@llecs wrote:

2) No difference. You wouldn't start seeing the large score gains until all CC util creeps below 30% or so.

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Just to add, FICO looks at two aspects of your utilization:

- % Overall utilization

- % Utilization on each card

As llecs pointed out, your overall utilization wouldn't see a change. However, for optimal scoring, it is suggested to maintain a (small) balance on less than half of your CCs. In other words, if you have 5 cards, you wouldn't want more than 2 of them to report a balance.

How many CCs do you have in total? Depending on how many you have, there MIGHT be an effect if there is a balance reporting on half (or more) of your CCs.

[vanillabean]

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@honeybunnygal wrote:

As llecs pointed out, your overall utilization wouldn't see a change. However, for optimal scoring, it is suggested to maintain a (small) balance on less than half of your CCs. In other words, if you have 5 cards, you wouldn't want more than 2 of them to report a balance.

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I agree. But a vast part of credit card holders may think this means you shouldn't use the other three cards, which could result in them being closed for inactivity. Or that you should rotate the use of your cards. The option of paying down the balance before the statement cut simply may not be known to them.

There was a time when I did not know that. I also once thought that not reporting a balance meant not reporting a balance. It likely means reporting a balance of $0, and that's an important distinction, I think.

I was just looking into soft inquiries. If a credit report from a CRA does not list a section of softs, does that mean no one pulled softs for you at that CRA, or does it mean that the CRA did not list softs? I would like to think the latter.

I'm getting a headache.