CLDS in the last 12-24 months?

[Anonymous]

I wonder if reporting a balance matters at all.  Perhaps a best practice would not only be to use each card that you have every 6 months, but also let it report a small balance when you do use it that cycle? 

[Anonymous]

Yup.  That's what I do myself.

The only exception is if I am trying to prep for a mortgage, or for my once-every-18-months pull of my scores at myFICO.  I am told that the old mortgage models are much more sensitive than FICO 8 to the number of cards showing a balance, so I do AZEO for that.  Otherwise I don't bother.

I will probably be pretty safe from the CLD issue people are reporting, since (a) I have no Cap One accounts and (b) all of my cards have a CL of < 29k.  The only reason that the CLD would bother me is that I am trying to have a reasonably high ACL (Average Credit Limit), over 11k anyway.  The auto insurance and Vantage scoring models like that, though FICO doesn't care.

[Anonymous]

Has anyone ever been able to attempt to quantify the impact of an ACL of $10.5k or $11k (whichever it is, I forget) on credit scores?  I'm not sure many people really think about ACL or monitor it to the point where they'd see their scores (that are impacted by it) both before and after their average ACL crossed that threshold.

[HeavenOhio]

Here's another CLD that fits the pattern:

BooM. Capital One CLD (Partner) !!!!

And one that doesn't:

Capital One Credit Decrease

In the case of the second CLD, the reason was "high utilization with non Capital One accounts." In this case, it was 32% utilization on a Citi card with six other non-CapOne cards reporting zero. The CapOne card wasn't mentioned as a reason, but it had just been 52% utilized and paid in full.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Has anyone ever been able to attempt to quantify the impact of an ACL of $10.5k or $11k (whichever it is, I forget) on credit scores?  I'm not sure many people really think about ACL or monitor it to the point where they'd see their scores (that are impacted by it) both before and after their average ACL crossed that threshold.

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No there has not, for at least two reasons.

(1)  Only Vantage and the insurance industry scoring systems care about it.  Most of the people here are only interested in FICO.

(2)  Even with FICO, very few things other than CC utilization have been exhaustively tested, because to do that, you really need the abiility to alter your profile constantly and at no cost or risk to you, e.g. moving your utilization up and down, having varying numbers of cards report balances, etc. all while repeatedly generating your score.  With ACL it's a one-way street.  Nobody wants to move his ACL back down by requesting CLDs, just for the sake of science.

[Anonymous]

Gotcha, I wasn't aware that under FICO models that ACL didn't matter.  Good to know!