Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the results.
I suspect the biggest movers will be the Merrick and the Barclay, because both are going over 50%. Barclay more points because it's a larger amount AND over 50%. At least, relative to EQ and EX. Keep track of those two as they drop below 50% later, and see what the follow on result is.
The number of cards is likely to be the mover for TU.
I expect there will be other, lesser moves for the other cards, when they report. It would be interesting to see your actual sequence of score changes.
This is my estimate for the likely impact of the major items. Not scientific of course, just derived from my own observations of balance changes and numbers of cards reporting.
Keep us posted. Good stuff.
@Anonymous wrote:
Bear in mind too that, as you are intending, your upcoming approach with your Barclays establishes you as someone who creates a large balance and then carries it for many months. I.e. it establishes you as a "revolver." Future lenders will be able to see that, and that is a behavior associated with being higher risk. Fannie Mae is requiring all mortgage lenders to begin factoring this in to their decisions (starting next year). Other lenders may already be doing that.
Good link, and while it seems Fannie Mae is planning to adjust to tag "revolvers" I wonder what the details of that tag involve? For example, carrying a $1k balance for 6 months, is that high risk? A $5k charge that appears one month and is paid off in the next two payment cycles? $50k that has dropped to $25k over the 30 months? Yeah, the latter (mine) is high risk, and from the article looks to be a criteria to be implemented (not sure exactly how it all gets accurately gathered/measured) but as to all lenders not liking that, my credit card companies seem to be Ok with taking on the risk of BT offers to me, at least at this point in my balance pay down.
It is, generally a good idea to get a longer view of an applicant credit history, no doubt about that. The open questions would be how does it get accurately accumulated, and what impact on the outcome, on the perceived risk premium, on actual offered mortgage rates, is there?
With most of my cards, once they get out of the initial bonus spend time period, or are on a 0% BT pay down, they get put on a fixed amount autopayment, which is geared to be more than the most likely charges in any month, or to pace the BT down, so usually something over $200. Then I have to give those cards their own "payment amount" such as $201 for card 1, $202 for card 2, etc, because otherwise it can be difficult to pick them out of a bank statement to verify payment.
Some are just outright PIF.
This works for most banks, except Chase. For some reason, Chase has "Minimum Payment" and "PIF" as the only two real options for autopayment. On the non-cobranded cards like Slate and Freedom, one has to go to the Blueprint options to add another amount to pay more than minimum, which is kind of an interesting hassle. Blueprint doesn't exist for cobranded Chase cards. But it is what it is.
Bottom line is, autopayment is something that should be turned on, even if one plans to pay prior to statement cut. It provides one more layer of automation to prevent problems in ensuring at least the scheduled minimum is paid on time. You are always free to step in front of the autopay and pay another amount, and the system will just deal with what is left when the autopay date comes up.