Haha I was totally kidding. All my cards are primarily food related.
although I personally consider the freedom more of a catch all card. It also gives 3% on drug stores and 1.5% on everything else.
the savor is basically all food although certain bills fall under the entertainment category, same with the gold card.
the blue cash also does gas.
so between them all I'm hitting all the major areas. The only real redundancy is the gold card which I only got to help me get my foot in the door with Amex. When I got the gold card I wasn't approved for the BCP so I figured getting the gold would help build my Amex relationship. Maybe I'll cancel it once the first year is up before the 2nd annual fee,
That's great! Congrats on another CLI 
Congrats on the CLI! Regarding figuring out your scoring, how many of your cards are reporting a balance each month? The gold card will count for # of AWB and % of AWB, but won't count for utilization percentage in anything except for EX2.
Ok here's the short and skinny.
before I added my Amex my profile was:
-3 total cards with 1 closed car loan
- 1/3 reporting with under 7% util
- average age of accounts 2 years 5 months
- age of oldest acct 7 yrs 5 months
- age of youngest account 5 months
- scores were 771/756/725
after Amex hit profile
- average age changed from 2 years 5 months to 2 years 1 month
- oldest acct changed from 7 yrs 5 months to 7 yrs 6 months
- youngest acct changed from 5 months to 3 months
- Amex had a balance when first reported but paid it off in full and that made no difference
- 1/4 reporting with under 7% util
- scores fell to 727/680/685
so to summarize
- I lost a couple months of my age metrics, but I did not drop below any known thresholds
- age of youngest acct hit exactly 7 1/2 years
- util didn't change
- accts with balances improved
the most I have ever lost with a new acct reporting was 13-20 points or something like that. In that range
@SRT4kid93 wrote:The only real redundancy is the gold card which I only got to help me get my foot in the door with Amex. When I got the gold card I wasn't approved for the BCP so I figured getting the gold would help build my Amex relationship. Maybe I'll cancel it once the first year is up before the 2nd annual fee,
If you want to remain in Amex's good graces, do not cancel the Gold until after the 2nd annual fee posts. Amex is known for clawing back sign up bonuses for closing an account too early. Also, the RAT (Rewards Abuse Team) can flag your profile as a churner and put you in "pop up jail" where you become ineligible for signup bonuses for a period of time. For best results, pay the second annual fee and keep the account open until shortly before the 3rd fee hits.
@SRT4kid93 So if you have one regular revolving CC reporting, and then the Gold reported with a statement balance you'll go from 1/3 prior to opening the account to 2/4 reporting. You're not losing anything on utilization since it doesn't count for it, but you're likely losing a few points for 50% of accounts with a balance. This is in addition to what you lost for the new account reporting and any loss you may have taken for the hard pull when you opened it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that now the Gold is reporting with no statement balance, bringing you down to 1/4 reporting? I would generally expect a small gain from that. Have the CLIs from Chase been all soft pulls and when were they in relation to the new account reporting? I've never lost that many points when a new accont reported, but I also have a dirty profile and have often had other things changing at the same time as the new account reporting (inquries aging off or utilization changes etc). That being said, I don't think a the huge drop (esp on TU) can be soley related to the new account being added, there has to be something else contributing to it.
Yep I paid the gold gold off completely and it did nothing:
also this score drop happened months ago before any of my CLI's but they were all soft pulls anyways.
to further confuse the situation, all 3 of my vantage scores rose about 30 points at the same time. So whatever caused the point drop, was FICO specific. meaning it has nothing to do with late payments or anything. Otherwise my vantage scores would have also dropped.
im not debating that a new account should never drop your score 80 points. But there were literally no other changes.
I know fico penalizes you for opening too many accounts in a certain amount of time. But at that time I had only opened 3 in the past 12 months, I've known people who opened more than that.
