Need help understanding Charge Card Scoring

Anonymous · ‎03-27-2016

Hi All!

Great thread. I'm having trouble weeding through dated information regarding AMEX charge card scoring. I just got my two first AMEX charge cards, PRG and Platinum (very attractive sign up bonus, 100k and 50k with $3k and $1k spends). I have three other credit cards, CSP, Freedom, and DoubleCash. I want to optimize spending between them, while still achieving the AMEX sign up bonus.

For utilization purposes, should I PIF my AMEX before the statement reports? If I PIF will and have a reported statement balance of $0, will I still achieve the sign up bonus? If I use the AMEX as "daily drivers" so as to achieve the sign up bonus, and only put a small > 1% balance on my CSP, will I recieve a score hit for the other two cards having no activity?

Thanks for the tips!

gdale6 · ‎03-29-2016

Hi there OP,

I have created your own thread on this. I changed the title and left everything else intact, you can edit the title if you wish by selecting edit post from the options pull down located in the upper right corner of each of your posts.

Revelate · ‎03-29-2016

Utilization is irrelevant for AMex charge cards with the possible exception of EQ FICO 8 (from cashnocredit's data); I never really ran up enough of a balance recently on my Zync to really play with it.

The balances do count for number of tradelines with balances though.

Also for any FICO 98 or earlier model, they will count for utilization (EX 98 on a mortgage application for example). End of the day though reported balances don't really matter as long as you're not applying for anything.