For the past year, my TU score has gone up & down by about 10 points each month based on my credit card utilization. All of a sudden today, it jumped up 43 points today. The only thing I can attribute it to is my last CA on TU dropped off. I still have several derogs (a DIL on my mortgage, a CO on a car loan, and two accounts reporting a couple of 30 day late pays), so I wasn't expecting much of bump when it dropped, but that the only thing I can attribute it too. Does this make sense? lol....I know, nothing about the credit game makes much sense.
I don't think it was AAOA. My AAOA was over 5 years when I updated all my reports back in January.
For the last year, I have been using the heck out my credit cards and paying them off every month to drive auto-CLI's and working on GW'ing the baddies. As of last week, I got the last CA to agree to delete their tradelines (6 of them), just waiting for them to report.
In my experience, most of the credit card companies want to usage so I use mine for everything I can. The best straregy to maximize you FICO scores is to have at least 3 credit cards, only let one of them report a small balance (ideally <10%) and have all others report a zero balance. That doesn't mean you can't use the heck out of them, just make sure you pay all but one of them off completely before the statements cut.
To be honest, I've had the best luck by calling the OC on my collections account and pleading my case. It might take several attempts, but they have all agreed to contact the CA to have them deleted for me. I do have a couple of other baddies that I'm still working on though. I will continue to send out letters about once a month. If you do a search on this site for GW Letters, you should find some pretty good examples.