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Ok once you become a score watcher "I have" new addiction I picked up. Be it daily, weekly, monthly you can learn what makes your scores tick up and down. I think I have found that for my scores you can make them rise and fall by having utilaztions go up to between 40-70% report then paying them down to 0-1% over a month or 2. People say the utlization scores return to the way they were and have no memory. I have done what I have said a few times in my credit history and each time when I paid off most my high utilzation the scores never go as low again. As if my utilaztion bottom has gone up. from 1-5 points and that becomes the new utilaztion base line that gets wrapped into the scores. Has anyone seen this as well. "My scores could just be picking up points from Age" but that is another thing I have found as well..
New thin files with under 81 months reporting seem to gain points with age. Up to how many for the life of the credit file I dont know. Is it 1 point a month for a few years till AAoA is higher??
Just some things I have seen.
Any other way people that have found ways to permantely raise scores outside of what they usually list as score influences.
@MidnightJester wrote:Ok once you become a score watcher "I have" new addiction I picked up. Be it daily, weekly, monthly you can learn what makes your scores tick up and down. I think I have found that for my scores you can make them rise and fall by having utilaztions go up to between 40-70% report then paying them down to 0-1% over a month or 2. People say the utlization scores return to the way they were and have no memory. I have done what I have said a few times in my credit history and each time when I paid off most my high utilzation the scores never go as low again. As if my utilaztion bottom has gone up. from 1-5 points and that becomes the new utilaztion base line that gets wrapped into the scores. Has anyone seen this as well. "My scores could just be picking up points from Age" but that is another thing I have found as well..
New thin files with under 81 months reporting seem to gain points with age. Up to how many for the life of the credit file I dont know. Is it 1 point a month for a few years till AAoA is higher??
Just some things I have seen.
Any other way people that have found ways to permantely raise scores outside of what they usually list as score influences.
A couple of things here.
1. In general, scores will go up over time if left unattended, because of various age issues like increased AAoA, inquiries dropping off, derogatories losing their sting, and so on. If you do absolutely nothing new with your credit, your scores should still tick up occasionally.
2. If you have low utilization like 3%, and then let it go up to 65%, and then bring it back down to say 5%, your score may benefit simply because 5% may be more optimal for you than 3%.
Well, there's diminishing returns all over the model so what you've seen does track.
As a result, if your mix of credit is good, and you have enough tradelines, and you haven't done anything silly... after 5 years you're pretty close to as good as you can get other than letting time pass and if all your tradelines are older than 5 years, you might get some points on anniversaries of tradelines or AAoA, but they'll be few and far between. Yup it's a slow walk, and why I don't really recommend people who are doing everything right do anything but cursorily check their scores with some sort of freebie monitoring solution to make certain no ID theft type things are happening.
I've theorized that once you get your AAoA over 5 years, pretty much anything above that is a complete wash. About the only thing I do differently than most is I plan to keep two open installment loans at all times on my report: even if it's just a pair of $500 5 year loans from Alliant CU secured by a savings account (at 3% APR currently), but we're likely only talking a handful points either way.
The only thing to add to what user5387 correctly stated regarding utilization, is if you show a pattern of high utilization you might get rebucketed, but generally the revolving utilization calculation does not have any memory... though I would note that the historical data is kept now for what your balances were effectively, so underwriting or lender internal score, YMMV on that. Anecdotally on the rebucketing event it's taken 3-4 months to go back to the pristine utilization level it was at previously.

The thing about putting more volume through your cards and paying them down, is that the accounts are aging and and you are continuing a good payment history, both of which are important factors in the score, outside of utilization.