Right, but 1% utilization when you don't use your CCs can be achieved with tiny limit credit cards and doesn't require high limits. If we're talking someone that has a heavy spend of (say) thousands of dollars per month on their cards and they allow balances to report or even carry balances, sure higher limits are going to keep those utilization percentages lower. This scenario however is not what was going on with the person to which I replied, so I simply don't want people to think that having high limits when you have no revolving debt in some way helps FICO scores. One can have three $500 limit credit cards all with $0 balances and someone else can have three $30,000 limit credit cards all with $0 balances and all other things being equal they'd possess the same FICO scores.
As far as what's needed to achieve 850 FICO 8 scores, I'd estimate the following:
- Clean reports
- Ideal reported utilization (less than 8.9% aggregate) across 3+ revolvers
- AoYA of 12 months+
- AAoA of 7+ years
- AoOA of 17+ years
- No scoreable inquiries (or perhaps 1-2 with very strong age of accounts factors)
A couple of other things that definitely help are the presence of an open installment loan that's almost completely paid off (less than 8.9% utilization) and having as few accounts with balances as possible... ideally AZEO or in the case of an open installment loan, AZE2 (1 revolver and the 1 loan).
