43% utilization on one card OR 21% utilization on two cards?

[score_building]

haulingthescoreup wrote:
I think you'd be fine either way, unless you have a bunch of open installment loans reporting, like student loans that haven't been consolidated.

You want no more than half of all accounts, revolving, installment, and mortgage, reporting a balance. This is why some of us have lots of CC's --we have (or had) multiple open installment accounts reporting, and we got extra CC's to outnumber them.

But you seem to have plenty of CC's, so you're probably OK there.

I wouldn't worry about trying to get both cards under 20%, if you did that. I just wouldn't want to have two or more cards at say 70% or higher, even if my total util remained at 8 or 9%.

i would, and then under 10%... until you have no card reporting >9%

[haulingthescoreup]

Oh, sure, of course the goal is to pay them off. I just meant not trying to swap balances around initially.

Sorry for the confusion!

[Anonymous]

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@haulingthescoreup wrote:

You want no more than half of all accounts, revolving, installment, and mortgage, reporting a balance. This is why some of us have lots of CC's --we have (or had) multiple open installment accounts reporting, and we got extra CC's to outnumber them.

But you seem to have plenty of CC's, so you're probably OK there.

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Oh!  Thank you!

Okay - this is another part of the equation I didn't pick up on yet.  So DH has one mortgage reporting, 7 cc's.  He needs to have no more than 4 (half of 8 accounts) reporting a balance?

So to see if I get this, IF someone had 4 installment & mortgage accts, they would need 4 cc's to report at 0 to balance out the installment & mortgage?  Am I getting that part right??  (And then they would need an additional CC to report a balance to get maximum points because if all CC's report 0 you get a slight ding?)???

And it's not making sure more than half your cc's report 0 balance; it's making sure more than half of all your active accounts report 0 balance????

That's four questions.....this is so interesting to me.

[haulingthescoreup]

Well, the list used to go:

-- half or fewer of all open accounts with balances
-- fewer than half of open CC's/ revolving with balances
-- don't have all CC's with $0 reporting
-- 9% or lower total util
-- with multiple CC's, probably OK to have to have one high util CC, as long as overall util stays low

I would definitely work on having the first two lower. I do better with just one or two reporting, and I absolutely lose points if more report. I have 11 open CC's, a mortgage, an auto loan, and a HELOC.

[Anonymous]

Great!  Major brain breakthrough in just a short paragraph - makes me happy to understand this because I can be the queen of my cards, or as someone says so well: 

Credit is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Who's the boss --you or your credit?

Thanks for helping me be the boss of my credit!

[jaysdad2k]

I vote Kroger. And you'll get all those cool points, too!

[Anonymous]

Okay.  We went with the Kroger (can't wait to see those points!).  I'll post if we see any effect on score.  Thanks for giving me info & data points - it helped us make an informed decision.  And I learned about things I didn't even know I didn't know!  (Common occurrence......)