I know having a mix of credit is the best way to maximize your scores, but I usually see references to store cards HURTING (or at best, not helping) scores.
The reason I ask is that I saw a 13 point drop on Ex after I paid off my James Allen balance and it reported to the CB.
Now, I DID get the new Elan card, but that reported BEFORE James Allen did, and I already had taken a 3-5 point hit on the other two CRA's.
Not that I'm going to spend money just so I can have a balance on a store card, but do I really need to have one to maximize my score?
@Dalmus wrote:I know having a mix of credit is the best way to maximize your scores, but I usually see references to store cards HURTING (or at best, not helping) scores.
The reason I ask is that I saw a 13 point drop on Ex after I paid off my James Allen balance and it reported to the CB.
Now, I DID get the new Elan card, but that reported BEFORE James Allen did, and I already had taken a 3-5 point hit on the other two CRA's.
Not that I'm going to spend money just so I can have a balance on a store card, but do I really need to have one to maximize my score?
Store cards at least under FICO 8 are counted identically to national bank cards. The Transunion monitoring product here does track them seperately, but that's an unfortunate red herring... at least at one point in the past (2001-2003 with FICO NextGen they were calculated seperately) and maybe it's a hold over from that.
Something else changed andt he update just got rolled up into it... I assume there was at least one other card (non-AU in case it got excluded for completness) with a non-zero balance remaining to cover the most obvious issue?
@Revelate wrote:
@Dalmus wrote:I know having a mix of credit is the best way to maximize your scores, but I usually see references to store cards HURTING (or at best, not helping) scores.
The reason I ask is that I saw a 13 point drop on Ex after I paid off my James Allen balance and it reported to the CB.
Now, I DID get the new Elan card, but that reported BEFORE James Allen did, and I already had taken a 3-5 point hit on the other two CRA's.
Not that I'm going to spend money just so I can have a balance on a store card, but do I really need to have one to maximize my score?
Store cards at least under FICO 8 are counted identically to national bank cards. The Transunion monitoring product here does track them seperately, but that's an unfortunate red herring... at least at one point in the past (2001-2003 with FICO NextGen they were calculated seperately) and maybe it's a hold over from that.
Something else changed andt he update just got rolled up into it... I assume there was at least one other card (non-AU in case it got excluded for completness) with a non-zero balance remaining to cover the most obvious issue?
Yes, I'm at about 15% usage across the board.
But now that you mention it, I DID do a balance transfer that went from a higher-limit card with interest to a lower-limit card at 0%... That put that card's balance up to 52% (from 0%), while the OLD card went from 32% to 0%.
Even though MyFICO didn't give me that notification, maybe it was on my report already, and just won't be mentioned until the next reportable update?
@Dalmus wrote:
@Revelate wrote:
@Dalmus wrote:I know having a mix of credit is the best way to maximize your scores, but I usually see references to store cards HURTING (or at best, not helping) scores.
The reason I ask is that I saw a 13 point drop on Ex after I paid off my James Allen balance and it reported to the CB.
Now, I DID get the new Elan card, but that reported BEFORE James Allen did, and I already had taken a 3-5 point hit on the other two CRA's.
Not that I'm going to spend money just so I can have a balance on a store card, but do I really need to have one to maximize my score?
Store cards at least under FICO 8 are counted identically to national bank cards. The Transunion monitoring product here does track them seperately, but that's an unfortunate red herring... at least at one point in the past (2001-2003 with FICO NextGen they were calculated seperately) and maybe it's a hold over from that.
Something else changed andt he update just got rolled up into it... I assume there was at least one other card (non-AU in case it got excluded for completness) with a non-zero balance remaining to cover the most obvious issue?
Yes, I'm at about 15% usage across the board.
But now that you mention it, I DID do a balance transfer that went from a higher-limit card with interest to a lower-limit card at 0%... That put that card's balance up to 52% (from 0%), while the OLD card went from 32% to 0%.
Even though MyFICO didn't give me that notification, maybe it was on my report already, and just won't be mentioned until the next reportable update?
Possible even likely with EX; it isn't the most granular of the bureau monitoring solutions. I'm still playing with balances, I know that I just dropped 6 points for going from 75% to 90% on EX, but I'd dropped something like 8 before that from 4% to 75% (but might have had something conflated in there, I wasn't planning the first test it just sort of happened so my file wasn't as pretty as it should've been balance wise). If we're in different buckets that might explain the difference in magnitude of scores, something to consider anyway.
I don't have an explicit EX datapoint for 50%, hoping to get that in early February.