@Anonymous wrote:
When I've done score simulations, it always seemed like 90, 50, 25 and 10% resulted in score changes. And this was when I only had 1 revolving card reporting usage.
Can't really trust the simulators for this, they aren't 100% accurate likely by design actually.
I know I take a drop north of 90%, I don't know in the 80-89% range as I never got a good testing point there and didn't ever go back. At least on Beacon 5 I didn't seem to take any damage going from $2 to 67% at any rate but it wasn't a highly controlled datapoint unlike some of my others. I've never been in a place until recently where my utilization could be isolated from aggregate to try to get a quality test environment for this... since I'm going to HELOC for my college financing anyway, I may go pick up the $200 Discover Secured card to play with 
.
You bring up an interesting point that I did not think about. The 96% card brought my overall utilization to right at 30%. So the pt decreases could be based on that as well. Unfortunately no way to isolate it, because when I pay the 96% to less than 90%, my overall utilization will go below 30% too.
Hmmmm.....
@Kidcat wrote:You bring up an interesting point that I did not think about. The 96% card brought my overall utilization to right at 30%. So the pt decreases could be based on that as well. Unfortunately no way to isolate it, because when I pay the 96% to less than 90%, my overall utilization will go below 30% too.
Hmmmm.....
Yeah that was my problem when I was maxxing out my Amex BCP back in the day: was it the 13% or 27% aggregate, or was it the 99.794% or whatever it was hah. TT had found some better numbers on that, but while I don't think it's file dependent (most or maybe all basic calculations after the bucketing are not to my knowledge) for sorting where you land on the individual scorecard I haven't see the full concrete numbers. May have to go see if BobWang ever calculated that out though I don't know that it got updated for FICO 8.
I never did get back to test it concretely, and other than someone with well established limits with a toy limit somewhere it's awfully hard to test accurately or without non-trivial financial hassle. I almost did it with my Chase Freedom at 82% but Chase had just switched to a second report when paid to $0 and that was a bit of a rude shock to me heh. If I get a useful Freedom quarter again I can test it possibly since it's only a 2K limit, but it'd be easier to do real testing with a throwaway secured card at some minimal limit to try to isolate breakpoints from 99% on downward over the course of call it 12 months for not much in terms of financial pain.
I wanted to add two tradelines in the next 3-4 months anyway, picking up a 3rd $0 AF one isn't going to hurt my file and after that I'm on ice till I graduate anyway which is on the order of 2 years from now.
Interesting thing about simulators is that they do not let you isolate reduced utilization on 1 card. They are looking at overall utilization. So I suspect you might get a better bump than the simulation based on un maxing 1 card.
Please let us know the result when it updates.
You guys might want to take a look or post over in the credit card forums for this stuff. Those guys over there really know, from experience, what they are talking about. Just saying but to add to this I'm not just jumping in on this I've been thinking about this stuff too. I don't use much of my cc limits. I probably am at 5% or less reporting every month.
@maxq wrote:You guys might want to take a look or post over in the credit card forums for this stuff. Those guys over there really know, from experience, what they are talking about. Just saying
Actually not really, the testers are all here because the moderators will move anything of the sort over to here when it comes to FICO scoring. 
@Anonymous wrote:This is really interesting stuff. I've been debating on taking my BCP card to 70% to 90% utilization - it only has a 6k CL. I'm just using the card for the 12 month 0% intro APR by spending only on that card and paying off my other cards. If I'm in the 720-730 range, do you think it will have an effect on my credit score if my overall utilization is still under 10%? I wonder if in the model the overall utilization acts as a modifier?
We're not quite sure how it's calculated, but I had a brief period of 90%+ account with well less than 10% aggregate (the long held optimal aggregate number) and lost 7 points on my file on EQ FICO 8 (dirty file, clean file will be more)
Before when I'd tried it on FICO 04, I lost 14 points (twice) at 13 and 27% aggregate respectively, 660 -> 646 -> 660 -> 646 -> 660 as I maxxed out the BCP (ironically) before and after a CLI. Presumably part of that may have been aggregate and part individual.
Finally PIF 6 out of 7 revolvers this month and I can't wait to see the the change in my 8 series scores. The scores in my sig reflect
QS1 97%
Cap 1 Plat sec 99%
Walmart 68%
BofA 42%
furniture account 53%
Jared 6%
Kay's 4%
- - - - -
Overall: 47%
After PIF reports: under 25%
Only the furniture account with carry a balance this month (under 50%).
QS1 97%
Cap 1 Plat sec 99%
Walmart 68%
BofA 42%
furniture account 53%
Jared 6%
Kay's 4%
- - - - -
Overall: 47%
After PIF reports: under 25%
Only the furniture account with carry a balance this month (under 50%).
