TU- High use of revolving credit usage at 1%?

[borg_cube]

Pulled my FICO scores today and I'm happy to report that I finally broke the 800 club in one of them. However, TU lists one thing hurting my score, and that's a "high" use of revolving credit at 1%.

Um, 1% is high???

10/15/08: TU-786 EX-768 EQ-804

I think my Experian score is lower because it seems like every time I do get credit of some sort, it gets the inquiries. I recently bought a new car and got 0% for 36 months at Toyota. Perhaps the high installment total amount due in relation to the original loan amount is causing this? It would be kind of crazy to pay down a loan where I'm not paying any interest just to raise these scores a bit, don't you think? You should have seen the Toyota sales guy laugh at me when I tried to put some money down on the car.

[smallfry]

Nice scores congrats. Forget the FICO explanations as I've seen too many report wacky comments to ever take them seriously. You know what you should or should not do. If the game matters and you want to see if the score changes just pay down the loan a few bucks. 

[MattH]

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@borg_cube wrote:

Pulled my FICO scores today and I'm happy to report that I finally broke the 800 club in one of them. However, TU lists one thing hurting my score, and that's a "high" use of revolving credit at 1%.

Um, 1% is high???

10/15/08: TU-786 EX-768 EQ-804

I think my Experian score is lower because it seems like every time I do get credit of some sort, it gets the inquiries. I recently bought a new car and got 0% for 36 months at Toyota. Perhaps the high installment total amount due in relation to the original loan amount is causing this? It would be kind of crazy to pay down a loan where I'm not paying any interest just to raise these scores a bit, don't you think? You should have seen the Toyota sales guy laugh at me when I tried to put some money down on the car.

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I posted a fairly detailed account of what I know here:

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&message.id=28439#M28439

The bottom line is, THREE parameters pertaining to revolving accounts appear to have different weightings for the three CRAs: percentage utilization, TOTAL dollars owed, and number of accounts showing a balance.  I'll bet like me you have high limits, so that 1% of those limits comes to a fairly high dollar amount.  My pet peeve is they use the balance on billing day, and I'm a heavy convenience user.  My wife and I carry very little cash and both have good incomes so we run a fair amount of money through our cards and pay in full at the end of the month.  So it looks like we owe a lot, but the balance is only that high for a short time.  This does mean I could probably goose my score fairly quickly by paying off the balance just before billing date to prevent it reporting a balance.