UTILIZATION Challenge !! Credit Addicts needed !

[taxi818]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Thanks guys. I'm going to work on getting Barclay down as the interest rate is awful after the intro APR. WORSE than Credit One!! Ridiculous. The others I will keep at or under 40% and less when I get the extra funds. My goal is 650 by Christmas and 700 by spring 2016! Doable ???

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Of course its doable. But scores will not climb like that from utilization alone. whatever is surpressing your score that is what you need to focus on. the fact you are at 601 says a lot of something is holding you down. ie. collections. charge offs or whatever. if you can get even 1 removed you would see a big increase. but bring your utilization down to 1% will not give you a 100 point boost in a year. no matter how hard you try.

[Anonymous]

Yeah the Barclays is really bad interest rate but if you're good with them they offer balance transfers more than twice a year that makes it worthwhile to keep around.

[elim]

my only recommendation is to stop paying all that interest.   once you get your util down, keep it down.    good financial health doesn't include giving all your money away.

[Anonymous]

I will be honest with you.  I still don't understand this util crap.  I lost 12 points for dropping my balance from bringing my balance of 1200 down to 142 on a credit card with a 5k limit.

So I just did a test to leave a balance on my card for this month and guess what?  It went up 11 points.

[Thomas_Thumb]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hi all!  So, this is a "what if" scenario that I need help with.  My scores are climbing wildly as I pay down my cards, with a 10 point jump overnight just for bringing UTIL down on one card from $500 / 600 CL to $259 / 600 CL !!  EX FICO.  So, I want all you credit addicts to give me a ROUNDABUT (Yes I know there is no way to get na exact #) idea of how my score may jump by the beginning of August after the following pay downs post!  I will be as detailed as possible:

Scores on 4/1/15:  TU 529  EQ 498  EX 517

Scores on 7/1/15:  TU  557  EQ  555  EX 567

Scores as of 7/23/15:  TU 601  EQ 586  EX 601 !!  

So, overall UTIL is going from ~ 81% to ~ 55% !!!! Still well above the recommended I know, but I am shocked to see how much scores have jumped just from paying down balances a little -- now these will all report with signifcantly different balances!!!!

* Side note:  No lates, all debt current for past 12 months. Student loans, auto loan, credit.  One collection in dispute, 2 collections medical debt aging off in Spring time.  

Any forecasts would be appreciated, as well as any advice !  Thank you all !!!

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Nice drop in overall utilization. It may be impossible to isolate impact of aggregate utilization because you have a lot going on. Nonetheless, I think you will still be see a score bump when you cross aggregate utilization thresholds. Potential thresholds include: 80% (some say 75%), 50%, 35% (some say 30%), 20% and 10%. I would be very interested to hear if you see score changes at 50% and 35% aggregate utilization.

If you can get aggregate utilization to under 35% with a majority of your cards reporting a zero balance with no cards over 50% utilization - My forecast (and it is a guess) on your score is: 650 to 670 (assuming collections are still in play).