Less than 1/2 CC reporting vs Less than 1/3?

[SouthJamaica]

Is there any point gain in dropping from less than half CC's reporting to less than one third of CC's reporting?

I.e. in my case I have 18 cards reporting. If I drop from 8 cards reporting a balance to 4 cards reporting a balance have I passed any  kind of threshold worth points?

[CreditMagic7]

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@SouthJamaica wrote:

Is there any point gain in dropping from less than half CC's reporting to less than one third of CC's reporting?

I.e. in my case I have 18 cards reporting. If I drop from 8 cards reporting a balance to 4 cards reporting a balance have I passed any  kind of threshold worth points?

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Very good question SJ and i assume the Guru's will soon weigh in on that for us both.

I didn't notice any marked change in these last 2 months as i let 1/2 + my current 29 cards report a balance which i found odd.

So with that part done i'm taking them on down to 1/3 this month reporting and looking to see if any changes occur as you point to in some threshold of cards reporting per an algorithm of some sort they might use on this .

[JLK93]

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@SouthJamaica wrote:

Is there any point gain in dropping from less than half CC's reporting to less than one third of CC's reporting?

I.e. in my case I have 18 cards reporting. If I drop from 8 cards reporting a balance to 4 cards reporting a balance have I passed any  kind of threshold worth points?

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SJ,

For anyone with a lot of CCs, generally your FICO 08 score will decrease if you have 6 cards reporting a balance. That applies if you have less than 1% reporting on each card. If you have over 10% on any card, then 4 or 5 cards may affect your score. Score decrease based on percentage of cards reporting a balance is more likely to be relevant to people will fewer CCs.

It is, of course, possible for you to be in a different bucket. The bucket you are in will affect how your score is affected by number of cards reporting and utilization. There is more than one possibility for each scoring model. More than likely, your best method of optimizing FICO 08 is to have fewer than 5 or 6 cards reporting a balance with less than 1% on each card. And of course, your aggregate utilization should also be less than 1%.

The only way your will know the best way to optimize your score for your profile is to experiment. I would suggest starting with fewer than 5 cards reporting.

Or, if you want to keep it simple, 1 card reporting a balance of <1% will optimize your score for every scoring model, regardless of your profile or which Score Card you are in.

For example, in a bucket I was in a few months ago, 4 out of 30 cards reporting a balance and 1 card reporting 3.6% caused my EQ 04, EQ 04 Auto Enhanced, EQ 08 Auto Enhanced and EQ 9 Auto Enhanced scores to drop. The rest of the EQ scores were unchanged. 3.6% utilization on that 1 card only affected those 4 EQ FICO scores.

[RonM21]

Everyone will have a "sweet" spot that they find when optimizing their scoring in.relation to utilization percentage. Like stated above, one card reporting a small % usually is the best scenario.

[CreditDunce]

I currently have 16 open revolver TLs.  I haven't seen any difference with my TU-08 score recently when I had 5 (less than 1/3) reporting a small balance vs 9 (over 50%) maybe 10 reporting a small balance.  My EQ-04 score moved in a range of about 30 points, but I do not have enough data points to make any statements apart from it is more sensitive than TU-08.

[Anonymous]

Interesting that you saw no difference in 5 of 16 vs 9 or 10 of 16 reporting.  Good to know as I think most on paper would have expected to see a score drop with twice as many reporting.

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Interesting that you saw no difference in 5 of 16 vs 9 or 10 of 16 reporting.  Good to know as I think most on paper would have expected to see a score drop with twice as many reporting.

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It's all percentage based like everything else in the algorithm, and perhaps dependent on scorecard as oilcan12 has suggested.

I'm surprised on it but I fairly view all things Transunion as irrelevant to my life so I never tracked it well.  I will be surprised though if I don't get a drop when two cards report a balance and I move from 5/13 to 7/13 on TU 8 on my scorecard.

At least on my data on my scorecard for FICO 8, EQ does have a line at 33% (1/3), but neither of the other two bureaus do.  I'd be interested if SJ could test it as he ha one clean file scorecard and two dirty ones and at least on my file EX and TU behave similarly on this aspect.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Revelate wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Interesting that you saw no difference in 5 of 16 vs 9 or 10 of 16 reporting.  Good to know as I think most on paper would have expected to see a score drop with twice as many reporting.

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It's all percentage based like everything else in the algorithm, and perhaps dependent on scorecard as oilcan12 has suggested.

I'm surprised on it but I fairly view all things Transunion as irrelevant to my life so I never tracked it well.  I will be surprised though if I don't get a drop when two cards report a balance and I move from 5/13 to 7/13 on TU 8 on my scorecard.

At least on my data on my scorecard for FICO 8, EQ does have a line at 33% (1/3), but neither of the other two bureaus do.  I'd be interested if SJ could test it as he ha one clean file scorecard and two dirty ones and at least on my file EX and TU behave similarly on this aspect.

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I will keep an eye on it, but so far I haven't seen any difference anywhere between a half and a third. Recently I did pick up 3 points in EQ, and it may have coincided with my going from 6 (1/3) to 5 (below 1/3), but I just don't know.

[Anonymous]

I didn't realize that the different bureaus had different lines drawn for things like number of cards reporting.  Good information to know, for sure.