@Anonymous wrote:
An individual card going from 40% to 45% utilization would likely have no impact on FICO score based on the individual card utilization, but you need to consider your before/aggregate utilization with the 5% increase... which would of course be the same change whether you increase that one card 5% or put those dollars across multiple cards. Aggregate utilization is King to individual card utilization.
What you need to consider if deciding to take on another "account with a balance" is how many accounts with a balance (and percentage) you have before/after adding 1 more. If it's a significant change, (say) going from 2 out of 5 total accounts to 3 out of 5 total accounts it would be more meaningful than if you had 20 open accounts and were going from 2 out of 20 to 3 out of 20. Just something to keep in mind.
Ok, thanks! I know for the most part, aggregate utilization plays the larger role. Just read something on here while trying to figure this out, that each card reporting a balance tends to hit ya for a handful of points at the very least. So wasn't sure if that was still entirely accurate and/or if there would actually be any difference between 40 and 45, since it seems like the next marker is 50ish%(+).
It's going to be going from 5 with a balance to X (either the 1 or 2) with about 7-8% aggregate out of 12 open cards. So, my aggregate will still be in a good place. So would be 2/10, which is a bit worse off than 3/20 from your scenario. So thinking that the 1 would be better?
