AU complete primer?

[Anonymous]

Well... Some interesting and unexpected results from removing myself as an AU.

First, I have done some more research and looking at experiences from others, as well as what I have experienced, AU accounts are not removed from your credit profile when you are removed from them. They report as terminated. So you will retain all of the aging and history provided by the card. If that card has late payments on it and that is why you removed yourself you will need to contact the issuer and request they remove the card from your reports entirely. If that fails, you will need to dispute with the bureaus.

Now the intersting stuff. My aging metrics stayed the same. My balance decreased by 71 dollars and my utilization only went from 27% to 29%. I did lose $8,100 of credit limit, but I have a $3,000 CLI that is yet to report that will help restore some of that lost limit. What is surprising is my score dropped by 20 points. 741 to 721 on EX8.

The only change was the AU reporting as terminated, so I know that is where the point change came from. It is just a matter of figuring out what factor was affected to cause the score change. My guess is it has something to do with the number of open tradelines/open revolving accounts. My utilization has increased to 29% from 24% before and I saw no score change. To my knowledge, credit limit and available credit are not scoreable factors so I would be surprised if either of those were the culprit. If any of the gurus here have some ideas on what may have caused the score change I am certainly open to sharing additional data points.

On EX2 I actually gained 11 points. This was from having 1 less account with a balance report. From tracking my scores I knew that I was on the cusp of an AWB threshold for EX2 and that one additional card with a balance should push me over and I expected the 11 point increase, as that is what I had previously seen.

[Eyepinpools]

Thank you AJ!!

[Anonymous]

I saw some kudoes come across for posts I had made here. It has been a while since I have visited the forums, life and what not keeping me busy, but decided to drop in and update some of my findings. The AU that was terminated was recently removed from my credit report entirely, I didn't raise a dispute so I do not know if this is something initiated by the issuer (Citi in this case) or something the bureaus are doing to prevent terminated AU accounts from providing aging boosts.

Just wanted to update everyone and say that the effects of an AU remaining after termination are not guaranteed.

Also, some additional testing indicates that you may see some significant boosts to your score if you add a low utilization AU account when you have moderate or high utilization. Adding and removing low utilization AU cards (<10%) when I have been around 25%-29% utilization has resulted in score increases and decreases between 15 and 20 points, consistently.