Utilization questions Help needed

[marty56]

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@Anonymous wrote:

So do u mean to pay off the balance before the statement hits?

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Yes.  For example.  If your CC CL is $1000 and you charge $200, if you wait for the statement to drop before paying, your util will be 20%.  If you pay $110 before the statement drops and then PIF the rest by the due date, your reported util will be 9% and your interest paid will be zero.

[Anonymous]

Like everyone has said...it varies.  I know for me, I just pulled my reports and they said my "baddie" was that I have too many balances reporting because I have 5 and "ideally" I should have 3 or less...  and that's with 7 cards, 1 student loan, and 1 mortgage - at the time, 3 cards were reporting...

So I had less than half my cards reporting and less than 10% UTI for each card and I still got that message.  Of course, with a score as high as I have, they could be reaching...

So my advice:

Take all accounts into consideration - try to have 1-3 reporting if you have 7 or more accounts, else have less than half reporting

Pay off your CC before the statement cuts (each card has a different day for this) and then don't put anything on it until you pull your scores...keep in mind it could take a little while to show up (ie, I paid my CC on the 10th, pulled the 11th, and it still showed a balance because it hadn't gone through yet).

Finally, even if you play by the rules, each organization (TU, etc) has their own rules so you might not have the same score but the goal is to get close to each other and close to a high score.

Good luck!

[vanillabean]

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@RobertEG wrote:

I would add that this is an issue of fine-tweaking your scoring in utilization.  Scoring in utilization has no historical memory, so next month wipes out the current month.

What this means in a practical sense is that maintaining fine-tweaking each and every month is more academic than practical

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Score fluctuations can be so much fun. A 49% util card will soon report as 0%, so likely a nice increase being down to one util card and one non-util card reporting. Revisiting the baseline, first the util card will report as 0%, then the non-util card. It should be interesting to note the specific ups and downs.