No credit card required
Browse credit cards from a variety of issuers to see if there's a better card for you.
I've been trying different things to see how my scores react to them. It seems like my EQ08 score likes to have a few cards reporting. Or, it might be the dollar amount (very low utilization either way). I'll have to repeat this a few more times to see. It's just 3 points but I'll take anything. My TU score doesn't care if there is 1 or 5 cards reporting. EX is tougher to figure out because I can only track that for free once per month.
Has anyone found one thing will maximize one score but something else will maximize another while the first one loses a few points?
@masscredit wrote:I've been trying different things to see how my scores react to them. It seems like my EQ08 score likes to have a few cards reporting. Or, it might be the dollar amount (very low utilization either way). I'll have to repeat this a few more times to see. It's just 3 points but I'll take anything. My TU score doesn't care if there is 1 or 5 cards reporting. EX is tougher to figure out because I can only track that for free once per month.
Has anyone found one thing will maximize one score but something else will maximize another while the first one loses a few points?
My experience is EQ is more sensitive to # or % cards reporting than are TU or EX. Given your utilization is very low, I doubt that is having a differential impact among the CRAs. My profile is rather thin (only 4 credit cards, 1 AU card and 1 charge card) so score changes due to # or % of cards reporting is rather easy to spot.
It's going to take me a few months to possibly figure this out. My TU score usually doesn't move but it gained 9 points over the last month. My EQ score was at 725 then lost 3 points for some reason. Those points came back when I let 3 cards report this month. That might be the reason or... it could be something else. I'm going to repeat that for a couple of months then go back to 1 to see what happens.
@masscredit wrote:I've been trying different things to see how my scores react to them. It seems like my EQ08 score likes to have a few cards reporting. Or, it might be the dollar amount (very low utilization either way). I'll have to repeat this a few more times to see. It's just 3 points but I'll take anything. My TU score doesn't care if there is 1 or 5 cards reporting. EX is tougher to figure out because I can only track that for free once per month.
Has anyone found one thing will maximize one score but something else will maximize another while the first one loses a few points?
Never seen where EQ likes anything more than a single card reporting on my file, which goes all the way back to when I was still on 9 revolvers when we switched over to FICO 8 here. 3/9 I would see a drop on EQ, not on TU / EX (all FICO 8) where I didn't get a drop until 5 cards reporting when we're talking 9 cards, so TT's correct on my data that EQ is more sensitive to number of revolvers reporting a balance. Later test data on more tradelines confirmed that too.
I'm skeptical of the drop's being related to that... fact is to my knowledge nobody has ever found that having multiple revolvers reporting was better with the corner case exception of AU's that weren't being counted and they were at zero by the algorithm which is an known penalty.
FWIW the optimization strategies posted over time are optimal for all bureaus / models, but it's hard to track many of the scores unfortunately. Usually the + on one bureau, - on another bureau for the "same" change in the monitoring solution is signal noise unfortunately. Few points is /shrug anyway, I'm missing 1 point on my EQ 04 somewhere, beats me why I was at 694 at one point nothing I've done since then could get me off 693.