3 point drop on Experian

[medicgrrl]

I'm not worried about the score decrease, but I find it interesting.

I had 2 accounts with a balance. Overall utilization was 4%. Card 1 is a store card with utilization at 24%. Card 2 is a Visa with 17% utilization.

Card 2 updated from 8% to 17% bringing my overall utilization from 4% to 6%.

I might have to experiment with this more in the coming months. Was the score drop due to overall utilization change or due to 2 cards reporting a balance above 9%....or due to a major card reporting above 9%. The store card is paid off and will update soon...I may put a small charge on it before that to see what happens.

[CreditBob]

From my experience over the years I have found this out. There are two different types of utilization that would affect your FICO score. The first one is the overall utilization on all your revolving accounts combined together. the second one is for each individual account. The third factor is when you have a balance on multiple credit cards. So to deal with the third factor leave a small balance on one card and pay the others off in full. So the thing that I have found out is to bring the one card with a balance to a utilization percentage of around six percent.

[Anonymous]

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@medicgrrl wrote:
I'm not worried about the score decrease, but I find it interesting.

I had 2 accounts with a balance. Overall utilization was 4%. Card 1 is a store card with utilization at 24%. Card 2 is a Visa with 17% utilization.

Card 2 updated from 8% to 17% bringing my overall utilization from 4% to 6%.

I might have to experiment with this more in the coming months. Was the score drop due to overall utilization change or due to 2 cards reporting a balance above 9%....or due to a major card reporting above 9%. The store card is paid off and will update soon...I may put a small charge on it before that to see what happens.

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Well, you didn't cross an aggregate utilization threshold, so that's out as a reason why.  Second, taking a single card from 9% or less utilization to over 10% utilization while keeping aggregate utilization in the optimal range isn't going to result in a score drop either.  If I had to take a guess, I'd say it has to do with your number of cards reporting balances.  How many total cards do you have and did this change result in you having more cards reporting balances?  If you went from less than 50% of cards reporting balances to 50% or more, that could justify the 3 point score drop.

[medicgrrl]

BBS, that's why I found it so interesting....those 2 cards were already reporting a balance. I'm not sure why the score change considering the thresholds that we think are used. The only other thing I can think of is the fact that both cards now report over 9%.