@Anonymous wrote:
HO, Were these the cards we discussed before?
It's essentially the same batch of cards. The situation where I was dinged at less than 8%/29% happened two years ago. The ding occurred on FICO 8 when my overall utilization went a hair over 5%. Those scores weren't dinged when I was a smidge under 5%. At the time, I thought there could possibly be an obscure 5% threshold on some scorecards. More recently, the idea of raw balances affecting scores has been brought up.
The example I gave with "balances too high" and "amounts owed too high" is current, i.e. the one score that didn't fully rebound from my recent AZ (all zero) experience. My current overall utilization is .7% (1%) and my current individual card utilization is 1.6% (2%).
@Caught750, you're in a great testing position. You have responsible balances on cards with 0% interest, and you have the ability to pay them off. With the ding coming when you didn't expect it, testing would be valuable to you understanding your profile. And the results would be useful to the community.
One way to go about this would be to bring all balances to 8.9% or less without reducing the number of cards reporting balances. After that, you could gradually reduce the number of cards with balances until you hit AZEO. When you do AZEO, make sure your positive balance is tiny.
Or you could bring yourself to AZEO right away, then increase the number of cards reporting until you encounter a ding.
