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AU cards are sometimes ignored by Fico 8 and Fico 9 (the one I have certainly is).
I would recommend allowing a small balamce to report one one of the two cards where Tiff88 is primary. Also, building up positive credit history on primary cards is more important than AU cards - which, by definition, are controlled by the primary holder regardless of who makes payment(s).
Welcome, @Anonymous.
AZEO (all cards reporting zero except one) works best when the positive balance is on a card where one is the primary user rather than an AU.
I'd report a tiny balance on the Credit One card. I'm choosing that because those cards tend to have fees and will probably have a balance anyway. Bring the AU and Capital One cards down to zero.
I'm not sure if that will give you 16 points. But the mortgage models like AZEO, and I think it's your best shot.
@Anonymous wrote:
I actually tried that and my score dropped because the credit limit on the AU card is 18,000 and it pretty much controls my utilization
Can you be very specific about what you tried? I.e....
What exactly were the balances on your three cards before the score drop?
What were the balances immediately after?
How much was the score drop?
When did the score drop happen? (Month/year or best of all M/D/Y)
What tool gave you the score that indicated the score drop? (A score that came with a credit card, myFICO Ultimate, Credit Check Total, Credit Karma, etc.).
I would recommend allowing a balance to report on the AU card and a small balance on one of the two cards where you are primary.I suspect you may have done that in the past. How does that result compare against a balance on the AU card only?
Side note: some other posters have reported a score drop when all AU cards report zero balance regardless of how large primary card CLs are in comparison to AU cards and the fact that primary card(s) were still reporting a balance. There is not a straight forward explanation for the score drop in that situation.
@Anonymous wrote:
This is exactly what I will try letting all of my cards report 1%
Actually I think a better result will be realized reporting a small balance (say between $3 and $10) on one of your cards with your other card reporting a zero balance. Have the AU card report a small balance as well (say between $10 and $500).
Also bear in mind that I am pretty sure you are talking about some credit monitoring system (CMS) that gives you an alert when a balance changes on a credit card and then gives you a new credit score. If so, the scoring model is either FICO 8 or Vantage Score. Neither of those will be used by a mortgage lender -- it's the mortgage score that matters, and AUs are much more likely to be counted interchangeably with cards in your name for the older mortgage models.
I asked earlier if you could tell us where the scores you are seeing are coming from (Credit Check Total, Credit Karma, myFICO Ultimate, a score from a credit card, etc.). If you can tell us that this would also help.
+1 Are you actually seeing mortgage scores, and you need your "middle" mortgage score to rise 16pts? They are correct in carrying a balance across multiple cards are damaging to mortgage scores.
Tiff- do you have any derogs, ie late payments, charge offs, collections on open or closed accounts? If so how old are they? I honestly do not know, but with your primary CC, you might have a thin and young file with the low limits- exclusion of being an authorized user. Are any of the cards approaching a milestone of 1 yr or more in age, if so in 2 months that can bounce some scores up from FICO 8 perspective, don't remember how much it affected my mortgage scores.