Utilization went up, score went up, how?

[jayjayhawaii]

Hi credit gurus,

Due to an unforseen repair on my car, I had to keep a high balance on one of my big cards, and my utilization on that card is now 88%. Overall utilization jumped from 31% to 45%. I've been dreading this due to the temporary decrease I expected on my FICO score.

However, when I logged into my Experian this morning after balance reported, my credit actually went up by 20 points. It's not a huge increase, but I don't really udnerstand why. Sure my AAoA is one month longer and it's now 3 months and not 2 since my most recent account. But my Experian profile under 'pros' used to only say "You have many accounts that are in good standing," however now it also lists "You've shown recent use of revolving and/or open-ended accounts."

TU and EQ are also up on CreditKarma, but I won't have those FICO8s until Tuesday.

I've been running tens of thousands of dollars through my CCs over the past year and a half, some cards I always PIF, but I also frequently have been leaving a balance on some, though rarely more than 30%.

I am by no means complaining, but am I not understanding something about the FICO model? Excited to see what happens when my util goes back down below 30%.

[Anonymous]

The only time a FICO score will go up from a utilization increase is if you go from 0% utilization to non-zero utilization, but still low utilization.  This was not the case with your situation, so your 20 point score increase did not come from a utilization increase.  It came from something else.

Regarding your aggregate utilization, your movement was within the 28.9% and 48.9% range both before and after (31%, 45%) so you would not expect to see any score change at all related to your aggregate utilization.

As far as your highest individual card utilization, you stated your "after" was 88% but did not state the "before."  The difference here matters.  If your "before" was say 70%, bringing that card to 88% could have no impact at all.  If your highest utilization card was much lower, say 5%-25%, moving it to 88% would definitely result in a score decrease.  It's important to determine this ballpark change/decrease, as it would give a better idea as to what your increase was from another unconfirmed event. 

For example, if your highest individual utilization was 5% on a card and it went to 88%, perhaps that would result in a 25 point drop.  I'm just throwing that number out there for the sake of discussion.  So, if you received a 25 point drop from that event, but saw a net gain of 20 points on your credit score, the unconfirmed/unidentified event that you're looking for actually increased your score 45 points. 

If you went from 55% utilization to 88% utilization on your highest utilization card, perhaps that only adversely impacted your score 6 points.  Therefore if you saw a gain of 20 points, the positive event that caused your gain actually impacted your score 26 points, just 6 of them were masked by the individual card utilization increase.

Hopefully that makes sense with my arbitrary numbers.

[jayjayhawaii]

Thanks for the reply. My Discover card is the one currently reporting 88%. The utilization on it was 28% before the balance reported to the bureaus. I was confused that my scores went up, particularly because of the message from Experian about showing recent use of revolving accounts. Must have went up more for reasons other than utilization, and the high util keeping the score lower than it could have been.

[Anonymous]

I would think then that you had something more major happen, such as a negative item falling off of your CR.  I would estimate that something positively impacted your profile which would have raised your scores 35-45 points or so, but almost half of the points were not seen due to the utilization increase biting into them. 

[Anonymous]

I believe what happened is one of your accounts hit the 6month mark. That is what that message is from.

[Anonymous]

A single account crossing the 6 month mark would not result in a 35-45 point gain.