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How can it be that my utilization goes up, by about 30%, and I take a card from $0 to $750 balance, and the day that reports, and nothing else reports, my equifax fico score actually goes up a point, from 636 to 637?
Obviously one point is close to meaningless but still in trying to figure out how FICO scores work, how can what can't possibly be seen as a positive event actually help my score?
I know Fico is complicated. But this is more a question of why would a score sit there unchanged UNTIL something like this and it actually rises?
@nycfico wrote:How can it be that my utilization goes up, by about 30%, and I take a card from $0 to $750 balance, and the day that reports, and nothing else reports, my equifax fico score actually goes up a point, from 636 to 637?
Obviously one point is close to meaningless but still in trying to figure out how FICO scores work, how can what can't possibly be seen as a positive event actually help my score?
I know Fico is complicated. But this is more a question of why would a score sit there unchanged UNTIL something like this and it actually rises?
Were all your cards at 0% before the jump to a $750 balance? If you were at 0% UTIL across all your reporting cards that's not a good thing, you loose points for that. (and 1 point isn't close to meaningless, it is meaningless)
@nycfico wrote:How can it be that my utilization goes up, by about 30%, and I take a card from $0 to $750 balance, and the day that reports, and nothing else reports, my equifax fico score actually goes up a point, from 636 to 637?
Obviously one point is close to meaningless but still in trying to figure out how FICO scores work, how can what can't possibly be seen as a positive event actually help my score?
I know Fico is complicated. But this is more a question of why would a score sit there unchanged UNTIL something like this and it actually rises?
Your utilization went up by 30% from what it was before, right, it did not go TO 30%?
The $750 is the 30% change in Utilization, so your $ in Total Utilization went from $2,500 to $3,250?
What are your total CC Credit Limits? If your credit limits are anything over $35,000 on all cards, then you still aren't at 10% of overall utilization. Your scores at 636 indicate you are coming back from negatives, so showing reasonable borrowing on a new card and keeping total utilization in check is a good thing. A small good thing, but good nonetheless.
Well, it's still only a $750 move in total outstanding balances. Not a large amount in todays credit world.
It is possible that at the same time you got a hit for the utilization increase, a benefit for another month of positive payments came in which just outweighed the utilization by 1 point positive.