Not new to this ... but looking for some opinions. I will say up front I think the answer is this probably is not worth the hassle...
Below are current carried balances after some holiday spending and an unplanned purchase. I will need to take a few months to pay them to zero AND it would also be a good thing for me to eek out every point I can while doing so (for a couple reasons). I will need to be financing a purchase in March / April.
The question is twofold:
1) Whether it is worth doing some balance maneuvering, which would not be terriblly hard. Care credit can not take any of the balance so it is out of bounds but I can move balances between the other cards a bit.
2) How I should apply an initial $1,000 payment to have the most effect. Snowballing Amazon first would feel good but probably is not optimal. $500 on the others?
Thoughts?
| MC 1 | 0 | 300 | 0% |
| MC 2 | 0 | 1000 | 0% |
| MC 3 | 0 | 1500 | 0% |
| MC 4 | 0 | 1500 | 0% |
| Target | 0 | 1800 | 0% |
| Amazon | 670 | 3000 | 22.3% |
| Amex | 2000 | 3100 | 64.5% |
| Visa 1 | 0 | 3500 | 0% |
| Visa 2 | 0 | 4000 | 0.0% |
| MC 5 | 3500 | 6000 | 58% |
| Care Credit | 0 | 12000 | 0% |
I think it is silly this thread was moved. My question is directly related to FICO scores and the effect of potential actions on those SCORES.
It's not about interest charges or balance transfer charges, its about managing balances relative to thresholds in order to eek out a few additional FICO score model points.
JMHO.
Not sure why it would have been moved but I haven't been around in a while and gave up my stick even longer than that ago.
Regardless, it might help to know a little about the purchase as the answer will depend somewhat on what FICO version they are working off of. Generally speaking best FICO wise on older models would be to snowball, for all that avalanche is better financially.
FICO 8 likely wouldn't matter in your probable scorecard but others have found breakpoints I didn't TBH so YMMV depending what bucket you are in.
One other question I assume that Amex is a revolver rather than charge card?
I use FICO8s as baseline, so yeah that, although Auto Scores matter too in the short term. Unfortunately I don't know what model specifically I need to target ....
The Amex is a Revolver.
The question is whether there is value in reallocating (which I can actually do through spend distribution and balance transfer). I tend to think there is not.
Correlary is where to put the first 1K of off schedule pay back (For score not financial purposes).
put 550 on amex and util will drop under the 48% threshold.
put 450 on amazon and util will drop under the 8% threshold.
after that reports, if any of the 11 credit cards offer a credit line increase with a soft pull, make sure you apply to lower aggregate util as much as possible.
@SlideOrInsert wrote:put 550 on amex and util will drop under the 48% threshold.
put 450 on amazon and util will drop under the 8% threshold.
after that reports, if any of the 11 credit cards offer a credit line increase with a soft pull, make sure you apply to lower aggregate util as much as possible.
Agree with your synopsis on the allocation. Think I will do that but don't expect a change.
As for the SP, all my SP cards get poked at least every two weeks. Unfortunately most have recently had an increase so no free UTI padding seems to be in the immediate future.