@Anonymous wrote:I'd love to hear Revelate take a guess as to where the trigger point is for when FICO begins to assess a penalty for "too many" cards.
Note to Delta:
* We know for a fact that some FICO models must have some internal line in the sand where they begin to assess such a penalty -- because Revelate has seen a negative reason statement about it.
* I believe he has only seen this on models earlier than FICO 8. Thus it is possible that this idea of "too many" went away with FICO 8 (though maybe it is still there).
* Even for those models where it is there, it is possible for a person to have MANY credit cards and yet still have high scores in those models, so the penalty can't be ginormous. Actually a fun research question would be to start a thread asking people who have 21+ open cards what their FICO 98, 04, 8, and 9 scores are -- just to see if we can find some people with very high scores in all of the models. Contributor SouthJ would be a good person to ask -- I think he has a lot.
SWAG? 20 tradelines I would say is fine; I have 30 on my report currently.
8ish is fairly typical 90th percentile for credit cards would be my guess, then people will probably go through a couple cars, a mortgage or two, and some other random loans in call it a 15 year period.
I don't think there's any concrete way to tell except for someone with regular 3B pulls (need reason codes from the wide variety of models, I have this on TU FICO 4, and even with a fairly recent 30D late there I'm still over 740, and my EQ FICO 5 is over 770, so the tradeline count isn't that big of a deal as you suggest) acquiring new accounts over time and then waiting to see if the reason code shows up.
Alternatively in a couple years when my closed tradelines start falling off maybe can see, but my scores even on TU are high enough for basically everything including top mortgage tier (740, PMI is at 760) for conventional mortgages that it really doesn't make any difference.
If the tradelines work for you, go for it. Really my reason code is just an argument for not opening a bunch of frivolous tradelines that one never really has a use for... we've seen a rash of that over time with people opening up store cards of places they rarely if ever shop at, when they'd get better rewards with one of their bank cards for example.
@Anonymous wrote:Don't let him fool you. That's the total number of credit cards he plans to have by the end of next year. 480,000.
No, I stopped believing Credit Karma's phony admonition that more cards mean a higher score 
My goal now is to have a total of 3 cards,
each with a $500k credit limit, no fees, and an interest rate between that of treasury bills and that of 1 year treasury notes
@Anonymous wrote:$500,000??
I can dream, can't I?
@SouthJamaica wrote:No, I stopped believing Credit Karma's phony admonition that more cards mean a higher score
It would actually be super cool to have a total of 5 cards, each with a 100k limit. So much easier to manage than a few dozen cards.
@trusty wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:No, I stopped believing Credit Karma's phony admonition that more cards mean a higher score
It would actually be super cool to have a total of 5 cards, each with a 100k limit. So much easier to manage than a few dozen cards.
Curiously, if each of a person's credit cards had a limit of 100k, then all of them would be excluded from utilization and it would not be possible to have a revolving utilization of 1-8%. At least in some FICO models. The early models excluded cards with a limit of 35k or higher. We tried finding out the breakpoint for FICO 8 and couldn't find it, but we didn't test higher than 51k I think. The limit might be 60k for FICO 8. If all of one's cards were excluded that also might affect the scoring bonus for having most of your cards at $0 but not all.
@Anonymous wrote:
@trusty wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:No, I stopped believing Credit Karma's phony admonition that more cards mean a higher score
It would actually be super cool to have a total of 5 cards, each with a 100k limit. So much easier to manage than a few dozen cards.
Curiously, if each of a person's credit cards had a limit of 100k, then all of them would be excluded from utilization and it would not be possible to have a revolving utilization of 1-8%. At least in some FICO models. The early models excluded cards with a limit of 35k or higher. We tried finding out the breakpoint for FICO 8 and couldn't find it, but we didn't test higher than 51k I think. The limit might be 60k for FICO 8. If all of one's cards were excluded that also might affect the scoring bonus for having most of your cards at $0 but not all.
I haven't really tested this for FICO 8 as far as the threshhold but I do know that 2 of the cards I tested a while back were excluded from the utilization algorithm. The ones I used as a test were Cap One Venture (CL $133K) and UNFCU Elite (CL $85K).