What is more important from a scoring perspective, how much you're utilizing a single card or how much your utilizing amongst all of your cards combine? Say one card has a high utilization singly but when your other cards are factored in it's a low utilization overall.
@MrCrabs wrote:What is more important from a scoring perspective, how much you're utilizing a single card or how much your utilizing amongst all of your cards combine? Say one card has a high utilization singly but when your other cards are factored in it's a low utilization overall.
Well, it's kind of tricky. If your overall UTIL is pretty high, then that means that many of your individual accounts are probably also high, right? I mean, you can't really have your overall UTIL at 80% when all your cards individually are really low. Maybe if you have a TL with a big limit that is almost maxed out, and then 3 other TLs with toy limits that are near 0% UTIL it could happen.
Anyway, I think that your total UTIL would be factored more strongly than individual, although I don't have a stat to point you at to prove it.
I'm curious as I plan to use my US Bank Secured card more than the others and use the rest occasionally just to keep from closing out. It offers rewards so I plan to use it much more often, but I am wondering if I am at 50% with this card, but 0% on the others if this is good or bad for FICO scoring.
I.e if I use $150 out of $300 on my US Bank card it is 50% which is bad but when my other cards($980 total) are factored I am using only roughly 15% of toal available credit which is good.
Also all of my cards are toy limits at the moment lol
Honestly, just use them as you need to. UTIL doesn't have any memory so if you need to perfect your UTIL for a future app it will only take a month.
