@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
@cashnocredit wrote:
Letting a card report 0 balance for 3 or more months can also reduce scores. Cards have to have a certain activity level or they get put in an unsued category.
Are you sure?
I haven't personally experimented with letting a card go unused more than 3 months or so but it has been reported by others here and it can reduce a score slightly.
Oh I see, lol.
"Can" is not the same as "will" but this has been reported a few times by posters here at MyFico. I've only let a card stay unused for 3 to 4 months, perhaps once a year, so I don't have any personal data on this and I so stated.
@Revelate wrote:
@cashnocredit wrote:Letting a card report 0 balance for 3 or more months can also reduce scores. Cards have to have a certain activity level or they get put in an unsued category. I haven't personally experimented with letting a card go unused more than 3 months or so but it has been reported by others here and it can reduce a score slightly.
I always let my balances report except when I want to "optimize" and then I prepay all but one. That seems to result in better (5 to 10 points) FICO scores than prepaying all of them. I don't actual;ly do that in order to aapp for credit. It's just interesting to experiment.
I know I've heard that before and even pontificated it myself, but it's certainly longer than 3 months though it may depend on lender.
I do know when a recent 8 month no activity card (Wally) had a balance land on it my FICO 8's didn't move at any rate.
I've only had a few cases where an inactive card, also Wally, posted a balance after an inactive period and all except one time was with the EQ 4 score. I haven't seen any effect I would chalk up to having the card go dormant. There were pretty significant affects reported by a person here last year who just saw big drops in an otherwise stable report. it may have to do with percentages. I would suspect having all or amost all cards dormant then suddenly using them all might be a sign of stress. Who knows. My fallback position to optimizing scores is just use all my cards and prepay most when I want to optimize a score. Depending on scorecards it may not help a lot (or at all) but it doesn't ever hurt. It does seem that FICO 8 is less sensitive to numbers of cards with small balances in comparison to FICO 4. Even FICO 4 seemed to care only when my oldest account reached 4 years.
