topic Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method in Credit Cards

All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:15:36 GMT

I have seldom gone above 10% on any one card within the profile but have never just had one card report a <9% balance while the others 0%. I've usually just let them all report as is and my overall utilization hasn't ever gone above 7%. Do you guys do this once in a while? Had it helped? I'm just looking to try a new method. It is kind of annoying to achieve the whole thing but if it works I'll give it a try. I'm looking to do the <9% on my Cap1 Quicksilver. Thanks guys.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

lhcole77 — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:26:40 GMT

It has worked for me in the past. But now I've learned that there's no need to micromanage unless I'm applying for something.

In fact, I'm currently letting all my cards report a balance to see what the effect is.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

lexandra90 — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:28:52 GMT

this is a good question, for me my Util is now 31% but my score is 650 ish because I am maxed out on 2 cards. I noticed when my util was higher but most my balances were at $0 and only 1 or 2 cards had reported an balance my score was 680. I think for me, my best bet is having less cards with a balance and maybe 1 or 2 report a balance but overall util relatively low. Hope that makes sense. I am still trying to find my util/usage/balance sweet spot. I hope others chime in with more info as this is something intriguing to me as well

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:34:08 GMT

@lhcole77 wrote:
It has worked for me in the past. But now I've learned that there's no need to micromanage unless I'm applying for something.

In fact, I'm currently letting all my cards report a balance to see what the effect is.

That's why I'm questioning the whole thing with no inquiries (8 months) and no new accounts (3 months) added to my profile, over the last ~three months I've seen my Discover FICO go up around 12 points. That's while I was doing 4 or 5 cards reporting less than 10% and paying in full after statement cut. So it's not as if that doesn't work but I just want something to compare it to, you know. See if maybe changing it up will shake it up a bit.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:41:01 GMT

@lexandra90 wrote:
this is a good question, for me my Util is now 31% but my score is 650 ish because I am maxed out on 2 cards. I noticed when my util was higher but most my balances were at $0 and only 1 or 2 cards had reported an balance my score was 680. I think for me, my best bet is having less cards with a balance and maybe 1 or 2 report a balance but overall util relatively low. Hope that makes sense. I am still trying to find my util/usage/balance sweet spot. I hope others chime in with more info as this is something intriguing to me as well

I've already committed myself to doing it. I wonder what it will do. Just letting them report is way easier and I really feel like I'm trying too hard. However, I have been gardening and haven't taken on much new stuff so I don't know what to attribute increases to. It's all a guess.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

uswala — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:47:43 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I have seldom gone above 10% on any one card within the profile but have never just had one card report a <9% balance while the others 0%. I've usually just let them all report as is and my overall utilization hasn't ever gone above 7%. Do you guys do this once in a while? Had it helped? I'm just looking to try a new method. It is kind of annoying to achieve the whole thing but if it works I'll give it a try. I'm looking to do the <9% on my Cap1 Quicksilver. Thanks guys.

That has been the case with me as well and I recently applied for 3 cards (in last 2 months) and was approved for all. Scores are not doing bad as well except for EQ which is low for some reason.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:52:34 GMT

@uswala wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I have seldom gone above 10% on any one card within the profile but have never just had one card report a <9% balance while the others 0%. I've usually just let them all report as is and my overall utilization hasn't ever gone above 7%. Do you guys do this once in a while? Had it helped? I'm just looking to try a new method. It is kind of annoying to achieve the whole thing but if it works I'll give it a try. I'm looking to do the <9% on my Cap1 Quicksilver. Thanks guys.
That has been the case with me as well and I recently applied for 3 cards (in last 2 months) and was approved for all. Scores are not doing bad as well except for EQ which is low for some reason.

That's the thing with new accounts it will be hard to tell if it's not just aging that is contributing to the increase. Somebody has to know whether this is better than a ton of cards reporting <10%. I mean, I don't know if it's weird to anyone else but on CK when one of my cards had previously had a 0$ balance it says it's now reporting a balance as if it's a BIG DEAL. I don't know if that's for security and monitoring purposes or if it's like a big no-no.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:40:13 GMT

I'm curious to know what the approximate score improvement would be by only letting one card report a <9% balance, as opposed to letting more than one card report a small/trivial balance.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:43:03 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I'm curious to know what the approximate score improvement would be by only letting one card report a <9% balance, as opposed to letting more than one card report a small/trivial balance.

Well if nobody replies with anything definite, I'll let you know next month.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:44:29 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I'm curious to know what the approximate score improvement would be by only letting one card report a <9% balance, as opposed to letting more than one card report a small/trivial balance.

Well if nobody replies with anything definite, I'll let you know next month.

Nice! Are you documenting it in a thread? I'll subscribe if so.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:52:00 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I'm curious to know what the approximate score improvement would be by only letting one card report a <9% balance, as opposed to letting more than one card report a small/trivial balance.

Well if nobody replies with anything definite, I'll let you know next month.
Nice! Are you documenting it in a thread? I'll subscribe if so.

Could just document it here. I'll document my utilization for the last three months. Discover FICO score in those corresponding months and when my most recent new accounts and inquiries were reported. Just to give everyone an idea of where I'm at overall. I'll post all of that up and if you want I could private message you when I update. My FICO on Discover updates around the 9th each month.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

elim — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:54:51 GMT

I always reported a small balance on all cards (never over 9% total UTIL) and always PIF... just before apping I let 1 card report 1% and let the others report 0% and I got a very nice score bump on all 3 B's.

now i'm back to letting small statements cut and scores are down from new accounts.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:55:14 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I'm curious to know what the approximate score improvement would be by only letting one card report a <9% balance, as opposed to letting more than one card report a small/trivial balance.

Well if nobody replies with anything definite, I'll let you know next month.
Nice! Are you documenting it in a thread? I'll subscribe if so.
Could just document it here. I'll document my utilization for the last three months. Discover FICO score in those corresponding months and when my most recent new accounts and inquiries were reported. Just to give everyone an idea of where I'm at overall. I'll post all of that up and if you want I could private message you when I update. My FICO on Discover updates around the 9th each month.

Great! Definitely PM me when you've got an update. I'm sub'd to this thread as well.

As for your letting more than one card report a balance, I'm just curious what your overall util is gonna look like?

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 18:03:47 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:

@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I'm curious to know what the approximate score improvement would be by only letting one card report a <9% balance, as opposed to letting more than one card report a small/trivial balance.

Well if nobody replies with anything definite, I'll let you know next month.
Nice! Are you documenting it in a thread? I'll subscribe if so.
Could just document it here. I'll document my utilization for the last three months. Discover FICO score in those corresponding months and when my most recent new accounts and inquiries were reported. Just to give everyone an idea of where I'm at overall. I'll post all of that up and if you want I could private message you when I update. My FICO on Discover updates around the 9th each month.
Great! Definitely PM me when you've got an update. I'm sub'd to this thread as well.

As for your letting more than one card report a balance, I'm just curious what your overall util is gonna look like?

When I had my cards reporting balances their individual utilization was seldom ever above 10% and subsequently my overall was never above 7%. I have $35,000 available credit and the Cap1 card that I'll be reporting the <9% balance on has a $3,000 limit. So overall that will put my overall utilization at ~0.008%. Lol not even 1%! I will include all of that in my summary. Maybe see what it does for two months. The more the merrier, right.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 18:05:59 GMT

Following this thread.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

masscredit — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 01:30:07 GMT

I used to think it was less than 9% of the total of all credit card lines together. Then I found that it's less than 9% of a single card's credit line. I was playing with it the other way before. 6-7% of my total credit lines equalled about 30% of the one card that I was letting report. I let it get down into the single digits for that one card's CL recently, That got me a few points.

Last month I had four cards reporting for a little while. I changed which single card was reporting so those two overlapped for two weeks. then Cap 1 changed my membership fees early. They did it at the close of the statements (both on the same day). All of that combined gave me a 28 point loss. I had a new car loan around the same time so that might have been good for a few of those points. For the cards that I swapped, after the second one reported $0.00, I gained 23 points. Didn't see any gain after the two Cap 1 cards reported zero.

There is some good info in this thread too - http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Any-Difference-When-UTIL-is-Below-9/td-p/3132654

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 01:50:25 GMT

I found this interesting. It seems to indicate max points are assigned to a balance of less than $100 on the one reporting card. From fico:

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 02:48:10 GMT

@jroc556 wrote:
I found this interesting. It seems to indicate max points are assigned to a balance of less than $100 on the one reporting card. From fico:

Is this really accurate? Or am I missing something here...according to that chart:

I should expect a 50 point increase when my 1.5 year old late payment falls off (due to GW success last week)
Dropping to < $100 util is a 15 point increase (seems very generous)
If I have over 4 inquiries and wait six months without a single inquiry, my score should increase by 50 points
Anyone with more than 3 credit cards will never see an 850 score, since having 3 cards is a 10 point increase above having 4+ (there's no way that's right)

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:00:03 GMT

You'll note that it says "Sample Model." It's functionally a FAKO chart.

Re: All Cards 0% but one <9% Method

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:00:58 GMT

I'm thinking the points in the chart don't equal full points on your score. Just an example of how the internals of the code works I would guess.