topic Re: Score calculator in General Credit Topics

Score calculator

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 14:35:14 GMT

just wondering, do anyone know of a score calcutor that is good or can someone tell me how many point your score goes up a month if you pay down on a credit card. i'm 15 points from a mortage and i had a credit card that had a balance of $168 out of $300 and i paid it down to $16, just seeing if that will boost me the 15 points i need. thanks for anyone's help in this

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 14:45:27 GMT

That depends a huge amount on what other credit cards you have and what their balances and limits are. If you list your cards like this....

Card 1. Balance = ____ Limit = ____

Card 2. Balance = ____ Limit = ____

Card 3. Balance = ____ Limit = ____

etc.

... then we'll be in a much better position to advise you.

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 15:18:55 GMT

Card 1. Balance = __16__ Limit = _200___

Card 2. Balance = __49__ Limit = _400___

Card 3. Balance = __24__ Limit = __500__

i only have a capital one card, fingerhut, and zales

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 15:30:03 GMT

Pay two cards to $0, pay one card down to $5 before statement cut.

Having balances on 50% or more of your cards hurts your FICO score. Having only ONE card report a balance of $5 is the best way to maximize FICO quickly. Having all your cards report $0 will ding you points.

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 19:33:24 GMT

It looks like the OP was at 21% aggregate utilization prior to his paydown. After this new balance reports following the payment, he'll be at 9% utilization so his scores from the aggregate change should go up nicely. Not sure about the 15 points, but it could be close to that. Taking down two cards to $0 balances though and letting just 1 of the 3 report a small balance IMO would grab him another 5-10 points, so overall I don't think he'll have any problem getting the 15 points he's looking for.

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 23:48:46 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
just wondering, do anyone know of a score calcutor that is good or can someone tell me how many point your score goes up a month if you pay down on a credit card. i'm 15 points from a mortage and i had a credit card that had a balance of $168 out of $300 and i paid it down to $16, just seeing if that will boost me the 15 points i need. thanks for anyone's help in this

Hi Pandora. In your original post you mentioned that the card you paid down had a credit limit of $300. (Above.)

But in your followup post, none of your cards has a credit limit of $300. (See below.)

Card 1. Balance = __16__ Limit = _200___

Card 2. Balance = __49__ Limit = _400___

Card 3. Balance = __24__ Limit = __500__

Does Card #1 actually have a limit $300 or was it $200?

Either way the best action is still the advice you got from ABCD. But it's hard to predict your scores when we don't have a certain idea of what your limits and balances were and are now.

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 23:52:55 GMT

I bet 15 points is totally doable. If not more.

He was in the 50%+ individual utilization area. Bringing both aggregate and individual down to $5 and bringing number of cards with balance down to 1 should boost them decently I would guess.

Also every month of no inquiries or new accounts may help a little bit just by natural age effects.

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 10:48:13 GMT

i'm sorry about that, i was at work doing this and someone was telling me 300 for some reason and i missed and typed that. my captial 1 card is $200 and not $300

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 14:39:17 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
i'm sorry about that, i was at work doing this and someone was telling me 300 for some reason and i missed and typed that. my captial 1 card is $200 and not $300

That turns out to be very good news for you. It means that, when your card was recently at $168, it had an individual utilization of

168 / 200 = 84%

When it was at 84% you may have been getting a much stiffer penalty than if you had a credit limit of $300

168 / 300 = 54%

So the fact that you will be switching to the strategy recommended by ABCD (all cards at $0 except one with a small balance) -- may give you a bigger boost than we thought (because you were starting from a worse place).

In the future, never let any card cross over to more than 49% -- aside from scoring penalties CC issuers can get worried and start imposing their own kinds of "adverse action" on you. That's not a risk for some people who have stable profiles with several accounts and generally high scores, but unless that is true about a person he should keep each card under 49% at all times, just to be safe.

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 15:00:22 GMT

I'm not sure if it's cool to post bobwang's FICO simulator charts so mods please delete if it's against the rules.

If you look at the bottom tier (500s) you can see the effect of utilization on scores. In almost ALL cases, bringing utilization down to $0 on all cards BUT ONE should have a boost of anywhere from 10-20 points unless you're already at under 10% utilization. If you're over 60% utilization you might see a boost of as much as 35 points bringing it down to $0 on all but one (at $10 let's say).

If you are in the middle tier of scores (600s-700s) or the top tier (800s) the utilization effect is even more severe -- as much as 80 FICO points from going from 50% utilization down to 0%+1 card.

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 15:35:19 GMT

thank you everyone so much for your help on this as i been working super hard the past 6-8 months with my credit on trying to understand it and get it on the right track. wish this is something you acually taught in school but hey it happens. when my credit was ran last month it was at: XP: 542 TU: 579 EF: 556 and the mortgage people said all i need is just 15 poitns to get the green light for a VA loan. that's pretty much why i came here to get advise/action i can do to get those points i need so any and all information is great for me. so when you say pay off all the cards but 1, does it matter which i pay and which one i keep at $5? also reading different sites they said i should keep a tiny balance on a card or they won't report to the credit bureues as they won't be making any money to do so, is that something you all heard as well?

Re: Score calculator

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 18:18:44 GMT

The one card that you select to report a positive balance should....

(1) Be a true credit card (not a charge card)

(2) Be a card in your name (not an AU card)

(3) Have a balance of at least $5 (not less, but $5 is fine)

(4) Have a credit limit of less than 35k

It's important to use each card at least once every four months, just to be 100% certain that they won't get closed for inactivity. But you can still pay it off immediately and keep the balance reporting as $0.

Your credit reports will tell you the "date reported" and therefore by reading your reports you can tell if a CC issuer has stopped updating a card each month. If that happens (the CC issuer has not updated the balance for 3+ months even though you use it) then you can certainly use the card, let it report a positive balance on the statement, and that would certainly fix that. But that's something that probably won't ever happen.

Ignore anything that tells you that you have to keep a positive balance on a card. That is wrong.