topic Re: Utiliization goes up and so does score in Understanding FICO® Scoring

Utiliization goes up and so does score

nycfico — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 21:07:45 GMT

How can it be that my utilization goes up, by about 30%, and I take a card from $0 to $750 balance, and the day that reports, and nothing else reports, my equifax fico score actually goes up a point, from 636 to 637?

Obviously one point is close to meaningless but still in trying to figure out how FICO scores work, how can what can't possibly be seen as a positive event actually help my score?

I know Fico is complicated. But this is more a question of why would a score sit there unchanged UNTIL something like this and it actually rises?

Re: Utiliization goes up and so does score

tufa4311 — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 22:12:15 GMT

@nycfico wrote:
How can it be that my utilization goes up, by about 30%, and I take a card from $0 to $750 balance, and the day that reports, and nothing else reports, my equifax fico score actually goes up a point, from 636 to 637?

Obviously one point is close to meaningless but still in trying to figure out how FICO scores work, how can what can't possibly be seen as a positive event actually help my score?

I know Fico is complicated. But this is more a question of why would a score sit there unchanged UNTIL something like this and it actually rises?

Were all your cards at 0% before the jump to a $750 balance? If you were at 0% UTIL across all your reporting cards that's not a good thing, you loose points for that. (and 1 point isn't close to meaningless, it is meaningless)

Re: Utiliization goes up and so does score

NRB525 — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 04:26:33 GMT

@nycfico wrote:
How can it be that my utilization goes up, by about 30%, and I take a card from $0 to $750 balance, and the day that reports, and nothing else reports, my equifax fico score actually goes up a point, from 636 to 637?

Obviously one point is close to meaningless but still in trying to figure out how FICO scores work, how can what can't possibly be seen as a positive event actually help my score?

I know Fico is complicated. But this is more a question of why would a score sit there unchanged UNTIL something like this and it actually rises?

Your utilization went up by 30% from what it was before, right, it did not go TO 30%?

The $750 is the 30% change in Utilization, so your $ in Total Utilization went from $2,500 to $3,250?

What are your total CC Credit Limits? If your credit limits are anything over $35,000 on all cards, then you still aren't at 10% of overall utilization. Your scores at 636 indicate you are coming back from negatives, so showing reasonable borrowing on a new card and keeping total utilization in check is a good thing. A small good thing, but good nonetheless.

Re: Utiliization goes up and so does score

nycfico — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 13:12:11 GMT

Actually my utilization went from 40% to 70%. And still the one point increase. I realize again that this is a trivial move, but I still don't get it.

Next month I'm going to shoot for a 5% utilization and see what happens.

Re: Utiliization goes up and so does score

NRB525 — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 14:01:03 GMT

Well, it's still only a $750 move in total outstanding balances. Not a large amount in todays credit world.

It is possible that at the same time you got a hit for the utilization increase, a benefit for another month of positive payments came in which just outweighed the utilization by 1 point positive.