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My thread title may be a bit deceiving in that "all" for me is 2 cards. I have one credit card (Capital One) and one retail card (Care Credit, Synchrony). Every month I report a zero balance on the Capital One card as I PIF several times per month. The Care Credit account last week was at 6% usage but after the monthly payment was received and reported dropped to 4%.
Somehow, this month my Capital One card reported a balance of $220 due to an automatic insurance payment sneaking on there that I forgot about so instead of 0% utilization on the Capital One card I showed 6%.
OVERALL utilization last week and this week is still 5% as the $210 paid on Care Credit essentially slid over to Capital One (off by an insignificant 10 bucks).
My variance in 3 FICO 08's are as follows: EX: +0, TU +8, EQ +4
It's surprising to me that I gained a few points with both (100%) of my cards reporting a balance over 1 (50%) of them reporting. I find it hard to believe that dropping from 6% utilization to 4% utilization on the one card resulted in a greater boost than what you think would have been lost from the second going from 0% to 6%.
Any thoughts on this here? I guess the next data point would be next month making sure Cap One reports 0% again, but then my Care Credit will drop from 4% to 2% when the monthly payment is made so again there will be 2 variables.
Total CL: $321.7k | UTL: 2% | AAoA: 7.0yrs | Baddies: 0 | Other: Lease, Loan, *No Mortgage, All Inq's from Jun '20 Car Shopping |
I have no intentions of sticking with 2, just thought I'd provide that data point and see what people thought of it. I applied for 4 new cards today, got instantly approved for 3 and the 4th will require a phone call during business hours tomorrow.
It just seemed odd to me that having both cards report yielded a greater score than only 1 card reporting. I've been pretty solid on only letting 1 report for months and never even considered letting the other report as I thought it woudl result in a score drop... but by accident the 2nd reported as well and somehow I saw better scores. Fine by me, as I said above I apped today 4 times.
@Anonymous wrote:I have no intentions of sticking with 2, just thought I'd provide that data point and see what people thought of it. I applied for 4 new cards today, got instantly approved for 3 and the 4th will require a phone call during business hours tomorrow.
It just seemed odd to me that having both cards report yielded a greater score than only 1 card reporting. I've been pretty solid on only letting 1 report for months and never even considered letting the other report as I thought it woudl result in a score drop... but by accident the 2nd reported as well and somehow I saw better scores. Fine by me, as I said above I apped today 4 times.
Think there's a loss of resolution with small numbers (read as anything less than 3 revolvers); and for full FICO optimization as I understand it under FICO 8, I'd rather have 5 revolvers.
It's an interesting point, but I don't know anyone who's really been tracking scores with limited numbers of CC's so iI'm certainly curious as to how your file reacts. Also how new is your file? I got plenty of wierd raises in my initial year of credit building, things got a lot more steady state in years 2->4.5 and I've been basically stuck where I'm at since the 3 year mark in this journey.
My file is 18-19 years old, 19 total accounts on it and an AAoA of 7.8 (7) years currently. Took it from 2 revolvers (which is all I've had for 15 years) to 5 this week with a 6th pending approval still. My plan is to stick with those 6 basically forever. I figure I went 15 years with 2 revolvers, 6 should be all I need. I will be interested to see how playing with 6 revolvers will be different and/or impact my scores differently than having just 2.