Well, I have been waiting for some balances to post. Usually I pif alot of stuff before the statement but I decided to let alot of stuff cycle through despite the fact that I have a few 0% balances on my report. Util was low 20% range and 3 things posted today:
New account Chase/Ritz 15k TL
Chase/ritz new Flex spend account 15k TL with 4500 Bal posted
Costco 10k TL balance increased from $260 to $5500
Score has been stuck 710-711 for a few months despite moving balances up and down $10k
Score jumped today from 711 to 719 
These will be paid in full on due date in lieu of PIF prior to statement cut to show balance and payment activity on my report as opposed to internal score boost attempts only. It leaves me scratching my head sometimes to see what makes the score move and the direction it goes.
Current Score: EX 712 4/28/15, TU 713 4/14/14 lender pull, EQ 723 9/16/15, 740 EQ bankcard 8 6/1/15 lender pull
@bobbay wrote:Well, I have been waiting for some balances to post. Usually I pif alot of stuff before the statement but I decided to let alot of stuff cycle through despite the fact that I have a few 0% balances on my report. Util was low 20% range and 3 things posted today:
New account Chase/Ritz 15k TL
Chase/ritz new Flex spend account 15k TL with 4500 Bal posted
Costco 10k TL balance increased from $260 to $5500
Score has been stuck 710-711 for a few months despite moving balances up and down $10k
Score jumped today from 711 to 719
These will be paid in full on due date in lieu of PIF prior to statement cut to show balance and payment activity on my report as opposed to internal score boost attempts only. It leaves me scratching my head sometimes to see what makes the score move and the direction it goes.
I'm actually running a little experiment at the moment to test this type of reaction.
I usually keep a lot of zero balances posting, with overall utilization below 1%.
Since (a) my scores aren't important at this moment since I should be in the garden right now, (b) I have some accounts with promotional 0% interest on purchases, and (c) I needed a chunk of dental work, I decided to put the dental work on 0% cards, go through a month with letting my posted balances rise to as high as 5% overall, and see how it affects my FICO scores.
It's early in the game so far -- 12 days -- there's been no change yet in TU or EQ and only a 2 point drop in EX.
Nothing would surprise me -- scores going down, scores going up, or scores not changing. Hopefully I'll learn something.
Not enough data to make assertions but I am not certain that balances on an individual card under some amount (likely either 80 or 90%) make a difference if your aggregate utilization is in check.
I had a tradeline go from $44 -> $4200/7500 and none of my FICO 8's blinked in the monitoring solution in the past.
I also went from 1 -> 2 cards reporting a balance today and one out of the plethora of scores MF offers moved, and it wasn't one that I cared about.
There's a step function in cards reporting a balance much like inquiry damage, and it certainly seems like there's some hard percentages for the utilization metrics... if you didn't cross one of those or trip up on the step function, I can see not moving downward, and if the aggregate CL might've helped your other utilization calc, could have even been a positive, or could've been some other positive swing. It's hard to say as most of our reports are so busy compared to consumer norms.
We really need some stringent testing, I haven't had the time to do it but I will be doing some more post-mortgage trying to see if I can figure out individual card utilization calculation at least. My 1K Freedom tradeline should be easy to do on now that I know Chase will report $0 as soon as you pay it and won't lose my expected 83% datapoint as a result this time =/.
@Revelate wrote:Not enough data to make assertions but I am not certain that balances on an individual card under some amount (likely either 80 or 90%) make a difference if your aggregate utilization is in check.
I had a tradeline go from $44 -> $4200/7500 and none of my FICO 8's blinked in the monitoring solution in the past.
I also went from 1 -> 2 cards reporting a balance today and one out of the plethora of scores MF offers moved, and it wasn't one that I cared about.
There's a step function in cards reporting a balance much like inquiry damage, and it certainly seems like there's some hard percentages for the utilization metrics... if you didn't cross one of those or trip up on the step function, I can see not moving downward, and if the aggregate CL might've helped your other utilization calc, could have even been a positive, or could've been some other positive swing. It's hard to say as most of our reports are so busy compared to consumer norms.
We really need some stringent testing, I haven't had the time to do it but I will be doing some more post-mortgage trying to see if I can figure out individual card utilization calculation at least. My 1K Freedom tradeline should be easy to do on now that I know Chase will report $0 as soon as you pay it and won't lose my expected 83% datapoint as a result this time =/.
I agree. I have seen score movement in my profile at +/- 30% total aggregate Util. Not sure if this is a profile trigger poing. Last year at the end of the year I went to 31% Util and got hit from 710 to high 680's. Only one of my BT's is above 50% (I have 4 going right now) & I never let 50% or more of my # of cards post a balance but that is alot of balances now especially with Amex charge and flex spend accounts. This month might be as close as I come and I will keep a close eye on score activity to see what happens.
So I figured out why the score jump of 7 points. The following day I was supposed to see a inquiry age to 12 months. I guess it went a day early. So 7 points from 5 to 4 inquiries in past year.