I'll bet you're like me: clean history, high limits, and you run a lot of activity through credit cards which you then pay in full because you like the convenience and consumer protection laws of credit cards but dislike paying CC interest.
TU gives a bit more weight to total balance on revolving accounts than the others do. My wife and I carry very little cash, buy nearly everything with plastic, and pay in full at the end of the month (unlike Dave Ramsey, I don't think credit cards are inherently evil, I just dislike debts with variable interest rates especially since all mine jacked up their rates during 2009). Since we have high limits, this means our percentage utilization is quite low, and our clean histories give us good FICO scores. But my TU score bounces around from the 780s to low 800s depending what my balances happen to be in a given month. If I wanted to maximize my scores in anticipation of applying for something, I could therefore get a few more points on my TU by going to each credit card website a week before statement day and making an online payment big enough that it will have a very small balance when the statement appears. Personally I think the credit card company habit of reporting statement balances rather dumb, because it makes it impossible to tell from a credit report whether somebody carries revolving balances or not. I think it would be more logical to report the balance as of payment due date, because if that number is small then probably somebody is not a revolver.
For instance, if I pulled my scores right now my TU would be about 785 because recently I made a $2000 charitable donation using plastic. When the bill comes I will pay it out of our tax refund so I'm not actually incurring any debt, but on my reports this will temporarily make me look like I have a fairly high level of revolving debt.
It does appear that 800 is an arbitrary threshold after which all mention of picky little dings vanishes: when my score happens to be a little less than 800 I get the "too many accounts with balances" and "too much owed on revolving accounts" comments, but when my score happens to be a little more than 800 I get the "no actionable negatives" comment, even when there's not a statistically significant difference between those scores.
TU 791 02/11/2013, EQ 800 1/29/2011 , EX Plus FAKO 812, EX Vantage Score 955 3/19/2010 wife's EQ 9/23/2009 803
EX always was my highest when we could pull all three
Always remember: big print giveth, small print taketh away
If you dunno what tanstaafl means you must Google it
