Does the TYPE of card matter?

[Anonymous]

CWCID - Thanks for the extra clarification on that.

BeammeUp- More helpful info as usual thank you.

[Anonymous]

A man walks into a bar carrying a pair of jumper cables. The bartender says.............

"Hey! Don't be coming in here if your gonna' start something."

[Uborrow-Upay]

LOL!

A ham sandwich goes into this bar and orders a beer, and the bartender says....

"Sorry...we don't serve food here!"

[haulingthescoreup]

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idmd wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@LynetteM wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

No, Visa/MC/AMEX/Discover etc make no difference to your credit. However, a non-branded store card does make a small difference verses one that's branded with one of those logos.

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Hi Cryostasis...can you tell me what evidence you've seen for this statement?

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Hi Cryostasis - check out the guinea pig postings - they were able to verify no point advantage to having a merchant card. (That keeps life simple, huh?) 

And also a note that FICO is only looking for one bank/national cc - as long as you have at least one, you will be keeping FICO happy.  Bank/national cc's are in the same category as far as FICO is concerned.

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So I currently have:

USAA MC

USAA Amex

Amex Gold

PenFed VISA

Do any of these qualify as a bank/national CC? If not howe much of a ding do you think it is? 

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Your AmEx Gold counts.

PenFed and other CU's, even the monster nationally-based ones, carry a little less weight in scoring than do national-level banks. Same with local-only banks --they don't count as much. (This little bomb was dropped on us by Barry a year or two ago.) Even though USAA is not a CU, it's treated as one by the scoring formula , so it also carries less weight. In fact, that's how we found out about this --a member with only USAA cards got the ding message for not having any national-level bank cards reporting.

As best as we can tell, all it takes is one. So as long as you have the one AmEx (from American Express, not from PenFed or USAA), or one Chase, or one Citi, etc., you're OK.

As for the whole store card issue, it's hard to tell even from the guinea pig reports. Adding any account will generally change your scores, and closing the only store card still leaves it reporting away and presumably counting, so who knows? That's one of the challenges of trying to break the FICO formula --it's nearly impossible to do anything in isolation. I sure as heck wouldn't open a store card merely to get a few extra points. If it's a useful card, and makes sense to have in your portfolio, that's different.