Credit utilization question

[HeavenOhio]

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@Anonymous wrote:

HeavenOhio, have you on your own profile tested the scoring difference in letting more than 1 card report a small balance?  I'm not sure how many cards you have, but say it's 4 have you tried all possibilities like letting 1, 2, 3 and all 4 report small balances?

I ask because you mentioned how you may have 2 report small balances at some point and you anticipate a ding from that, so I'm wondering if it's just because you assume that on your profile you'll get a ding or if you've tested it and received said ding.

Last year I was big into the only letting 1 card report a small balance, but one month I "messed up" and misjudged the days or something and 2 reported small balances.  This brought me up to 50% of cards reporting balances (4 at the time).  I received no scoring ding.  I then said screw it and let the 3rd card report a balance, no ding and finally allowed all of my cards to have a balance reported at the same time and still received no ding.  I did all of that just for testing purposes, but discovered that on my profile my FICO 08's remain unchanged regardless of how many of my cards report small balances. 

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I've only been monitoring all three FICO 8s simultaneously for about five weeks, but I have Experian data going back a little further. I currently have seven cards reporting, five majors and two retail.

In that time, I've found that…

1. Letting a second card report dings my Equifax score. I lost five points that came right back when I went back to one card.
2. Equifax and TransUnion don't care if a retail card is the only one that reports, but Experian dinged me by four points when that happened. The four points came back once a major card reported.
3. Experian will allow me to have as many as three cards reporting without a ding, but a ding will occur if four of the seven report.

Summarizing, when I dropped to having only the retail card reporting, my Experian score went down. When the major card reported, two cards had balances. Equifax went down, and Experian went up. When the retail card reported a zero balance, Equifax went back up. TransUnion stayed the same through all of this.

[sarge12]

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@Anonymous wrote:

HeavenOhio, have you on your own profile tested the scoring difference in letting more than 1 card report a small balance?  I'm not sure how many cards you have, but say it's 4 have you tried all possibilities like letting 1, 2, 3 and all 4 report small balances?

I ask because you mentioned how you may have 2 report small balances at some point and you anticipate a ding from that, so I'm wondering if it's just because you assume that on your profile you'll get a ding or if you've tested it and received said ding.

Last year I was big into the only letting 1 card report a small balance, but one month I "messed up" and misjudged the days or something and 2 reported small balances.  This brought me up to 50% of cards reporting balances (4 at the time).  I received no scoring ding.  I then said screw it and let the 3rd card report a balance, no ding and finally allowed all of my cards to have a balance reported at the same time and still received no ding.  I did all of that just for testing purposes, but discovered that on my profile my FICO 08's remain unchanged regardless of how many of my cards report small balances. 

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BBS, you can say for a fact that in the scenario you stated you tested that wheather you had 1,2,3 or 4 cards report your score remained unchanged. What the problem is with that is you have no way of knowing for sure that your score would not have increased if only 1 had been reporting. I say this because 2 months ago my scores were 804 TU, 809 EX, and 818 Eq...this was on credit check total so they were all fico 08. The only difference was iqueries TU 6, Ex 2, Eq 1. Now with the exact same info reporting, including the same number of inqueries, my scores are TU 817, Ex 809, Eq 818. Now why TU went up by 13 points in 2 months, I have no clue. I compared every metric on all 3 reports that CCT reported...all 3 were identical except inqueries. I think they sometimes change things just to mess with us, and keep all us geniuses from figuring out the scoring model. While I appreciate the bump on TU, it so defied logic on everything I thought I knew about the effect of inqueries. With the 6 inqueries logic says that should be my lowest score...and it was 2 months ago...now it is 1 point away from being the highest. It still reports 6 inqueries.

[Anonymous]

I can say with almost 100% certainty that it didn't matter, because not only did I increase my cards showing utilization 1 by 1 but I also took them back down from 4 to 1 over the next cycle 1 by 1.  None of my 3 FICO 08 scores changed at all during this period of time (about 6 weeks).  For what you're saying to be true, I would have had to have been given an identical amount of points for something else across all 3 bureaus to counter the points lost from more cards reporting balances, then as I had less cards report balances I would have had to have those points taken back away, again for something else, at the same exact time on all 3 bureaus.  That's more or less a statistical impossibility, which is why I deduced that on my file it doesn't matter how many cards I have report small balances.

[sarge12]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I can say with almost 100% certainty that it didn't matter, because not only did I increase my cards showing utilization 1 by 1 but I also took them back down from 4 to 1 over the next cycle 1 by 1.  None of my 3 FICO 08 scores changed at all during this period of time (about 6 weeks).  For what you're saying to be true, I would have had to have been given an identical amount of points for something else across all 3 bureaus to counter the points lost from more cards reporting balances, then as I had less cards report balances I would have had to have those points taken back away, again for something else, at the same exact time on all 3 bureaus.  That's more or less a statistical impossibility, which is why I deduced that on my file it doesn't matter how many cards I have report small balances.

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That would definately make it close to 100%, but after what happened with my TU score last month, nothing much surprises me...I swear until then I thought I not only knew that inqueries affected my score, but thought I could accurately predict how much. I should not complain about a score increasing, I know, but it just makes 0% sense to me.

[Anonymous]

I hear you, there are definitely some quirky things with respect to credit and scoring, especially things that seem isolated to 1 bureau.  I was having all kinds of TU issues last summer with unexplained score changes, but by fall/winter they seemed to level out.  Lately EQ has been the red headed stepchild of the 3 bureaus for me with more inconsistency from them.  EX has been an absolute rock though with either no change to my score or a very slow climb every couple of months.

[sarge12]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I hear you, there are definitely some quirky things with respect to credit and scoring, especially things that seem isolated to 1 bureau.  I was having all kinds of TU issues last summer with unexplained score changes, but by fall/winter they seemed to level out.  Lately EQ has been the red headed stepchild of the 3 bureaus for me with more inconsistency from them.  EX has been an absolute rock though with either no change to my score or a very slow climb every couple of months.

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BBS, I know this may sound a little crazy, but I think they have some querkiness built into the scoring model on purpose, so no fancy computer nerd can ever figure out the exact model. I mean, if someone entered every data point on a credit report into a computer analysis program over time they could reproduce the model. If however the model makes occasional random score adjustments for no valid credit reason, it would prevent anyone from replicating the model...and that is fico's bread and butter.

[Anonymous]

Definitely a conspiracy theory there, but who knows you very well could be right.  I think everyone that's been watching their reports/scores for a year or longer can tell a story or two that simply can't be explained... so you never know!