cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Number of CCs and score

tag
Anonymous
Not applicable

Number of CCs and score

The question of how many CCs is ideal has been discussed a lot in this forum. I wanted to present some data from recent experience. Everyone's mileage may vary, but more data is always useful.

 

Basics: I have only CCs as open accounts. My AAoA is 7 years. I have had 1 to 4 CCs on EQ and TU (and the two CRs don't have identical data).

 

TU: Going from 1 to 2 CCs increased my score by at least 20 points. I say at least 20 because the net increase was 20. Presumably, I took a hit for "New account" (that I estimate to be about 5 points). The corresponding inquiry was not on TU and AAoA remained unaffected. A few months back, going from no CCs to 1 CC (that I've had for 10+ years but briefly stopped reporting because of some technical problems) increased my score by 40+ points.

 

EF: I've always had at least 2 CCs on EF. I really don't understand EF's FICO scoring. So I am just going to present as much of the info I think is relevant. The notation below is:

 

(Number of CCs with balance/Total CCs, Time since most recent account opened, Number of inquiries, AAoA)

 

Let's call the starting score 0. It's only been downhill from there. Smiley Happy The symbol `*' in the third field means no accounts opened in the last two years.

 

Sep: (1/3, *, 1, 7):      0

Oct: (2/3, *, 1, 8):    -16

Oct: (2/4, 1, 2, 7):    -19

Nov: (1/4, 2, 2, 7):   -11

Nov: (1/3, 2, 2, 7):   -11

Nov: (2/3, 2, 2, 7):   -19

 

Summary:

 

Going from 4 to 3 CCs made absolutely no difference, all else being identical in EF. So I suppose that going from 3 to 4 CCs does not help mix at all. From the TU data, it is clear that going from 0 to 1 CCs helped a lot (~40 points) and going from 1 to 2 CCs also helped quite a bit (20+ points). I don't know if or how much going from 2 to 3 CCs helps.

 

Utilization is somewhat of a mystery to me. Going from 1/3 to 2/3 seems to have impacted the score by -16 points in Oct, but going back to 1/3 brought back only 5 of those points (to -11) in Nov. So the remaining 11 points is likely attributable to the new account recency and inquiries. An oddity is that the new account recency and inquiries seem to have hurt by only 3 points in Oct (from -16 to -19). The only explanation I can think of is that AAoA changing from 7 to 8 years caused a rebucketing that caused the score to *drop* by 8 points and, in this new bucket, the new account recency and inquiries hurt by only 3 points. In the 7 year AAoA bucket, the new account recency and inquiries hurt by 11 points. In both buckets, going from 1/3 to 2/3 utilization hurt by 8 points.

Message 1 of 1
Advertiser Disclosure: The offers that appear on this site are from third party advertisers from whom FICO receives compensation.