Was I re-bucketed or something?

[Thomas_Thumb]

OK - I admit I have not read the string of responses here.

I went back to the 1st post and thought that the three cards in question were not being used vs just not reporting balances.

So all three of these cards were being used and just not reporting balances??? If so, then I was premature in my initial response.

[Thomas_Thumb]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks SJ!

Thanks for drawing TT's attention to the fact that our OP has been using the cards and paying to zero most or every month - I missed that

This is an area that Thom Thumb knows much more about than myself, but I would love to see some clear answers on it.  I think it would have practical implications for a lot of us with cards we shoebox or PTZ.  I would love to see some concerted attempts by several people to answer the following questions:

Do these "inactivity" scoring penalties exist for certain?  On what grounds do we know this? [Best to review the posts - I think there is some conjucture by the poster but, he may have included a reason statement]. 

If yes.....

Is it in both the mortgage models and FICO 8? [poster data was specific to Fico 08]

Does using a card but paying to zero prevent FICO from considering it inactive? [No, I don't believe it does]

Does the scoring penalty kick in only after the "inactive" card is used again? [yes - that is what the poster mentioned]

      Does "used" mean a transaction or allowed to report a positive balance to the CRA?

There should be easy ways to test all of these claims empirically and by a variety of people and profiles. [Should be able to test for those that allow cards to go unused over 6 months]

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I can't speak to the score drop based on personal experience and am not in a position to test. Others have posted data - but they had not been using the cards and the data was specific to Fico 08. I don't have time to dig up the posts but, I thought there were reason statements mentioned in the post(s).

[wasCB14]

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

SJ -

Accounts that show payments - which your's do if they were used and paid off show activity. Thus, they would not be tagged as inactive.

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As far as the "no reported recent balance cards"...

One is a mostly SD'ed ED, and Amex has never reported my payments on any account (credit or charge). They just report the CL (if credit) or high balance (if charge), end-of-statement balance, and that it's current.

The other is Brooks Brothers, and I can't make sense of what they report. They report I had scheduled payments in some months when they also say my balance was zero. I guess those numbers were reported by Synchrony and never corrected by Citi. I'm just satisfied that it reports as open and current.

But, in short my "pay before statement close" payments within the last few months are not reported for either.

[Thomas_Thumb]

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@wasCB14 wrote:

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

SJ -

Accounts that show payments - which your's do if they were used and paid off show activity. Thus, they would not be tagged as inactive.

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As far as the "no reported recent balance cards"...

One is a mostly SD'ed ED, and Amex has never reported my payments on any account (credit or charge). They just report the CL (if credit) or high balance (if charge), end-of-statement balance, and that it's current.

The other is Brooks Brothers, and I can't make sense of what they report. They report I had scheduled payments in some months when they also say my balance was zero. I guess those numbers were reported by Synchrony and never corrected by Citi. I'm just satisfied that it reports as open and current.

But, in short my "pay before statement close" payments within the last few months are not reported for either.

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Other than getting actual credit reports from the CRAs, not sure how to confirm what was or was not being reported. Certainly the "no reported recent balance" would be indicitive of tagging a card as inactive.

[newhis]

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

SJ -

Accounts that show payments - which your's do if they were used and paid off show activity. Thus, they would not be tagged as inactive.

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Do reports change if you get them from one source or other (online, print, paid service)?

I can't find a difference between a SD card and one that is used each month and PTZ and report $0 balance, on the reports I have.

[wasCB14]

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

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@wasCB14 wrote:

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

SJ -

Accounts that show payments - which your's do if they were used and paid off show activity. Thus, they would not be tagged as inactive.

---

As far as the "no reported recent balance cards"...

One is a mostly SD'ed ED, and Amex has never reported my payments on any account (credit or charge). They just report the CL (if credit) or high balance (if charge), end-of-statement balance, and that it's current.

The other is Brooks Brothers, and I can't make sense of what they report. They report I had scheduled payments in some months when they also say my balance was zero. I guess those numbers were reported by Synchrony and never corrected by Citi. I'm just satisfied that it reports as open and current.

But, in short my "pay before statement close" payments within the last few months are not reported for either.

---

Other than getting actual credit reports from the CRAs, not sure how to confirm what was or was not being reported. Certainly the "no reported recent balance" would be indicitive of tagging a card as inactive.

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I went to annualcreditreport.com and got my full TU yesterday, so my info about reported payments is up-to-date.

[Anonymous]

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@newhis wrote:

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

SJ -

Accounts that show payments - which your's do if they were used and paid off show activity. Thus, they would not be tagged as inactive.

---

Do reports change if you get them from one source or other (online, print, paid service)?

I can't find a difference between a SD card and one that is used each month and PTZ and report $0 balance, on the reports I have.

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Yes.  Reports obtained from AnnualCreditReport.com will contain what are called "trended data" on your credit cards.  This means the balance that was reported each month for the last few years.  It will also list all of the payments you made (and their dates) during the last few years.  That enables creditors to see whether you are a person who pays the amount he owes on his CC statement in full or not.

Reports obtained from "third party" credit monitoring services, like Credit Karma, myFICO, Credit Check Total, etc., typically do not contain these trended data (nor do they contain a record of the "soft" pull inquiries done to your profile)..  Third party reports are otherwise typically up to date and complete.

[newhis]

Thank you, the report was from CCT.

[Anonymous]

Hey SouthJ.  Have you considered being the poster boy for testing this whole "inactivity" thing?

You seem like you might be the perfect person, given that you have got so many credit cards and almost all of them report $0 each month.

If you don't mind me asking, of your 25 (?) open cards, how many are,,,,

REPORTING $0 BUT ACTIVE, defined as...

     *  Have reported $0 every month for the last 8 months

     *  Have had a charge placed on them at least every 60 days

REPORTING $0 BUT "INACTIVE", defined as....

     *  Have reported $0 every month for the last 8 months

     *  Have had no charges or payments of any kind made to them for the last 8 months

If you were to wait till your profile feels really stable, then take all the cards in the first group and place $5 on them and let them report, it would be interesting to see what alerts and reason codes and score changes happened in the next 40 days.

Then you could wait till things quieted down and a couple months later do the same thing with the cards in the second group.

A slight tweak that feels right to me is that I would exclude from this test any cards that are less than 8 months old and also any that have never been used even once.  Such cards might behave strangely and would not be good test cases I think.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hey SouthJ.  Have you considered being the poster boy for testing this whole "inactivity" thing?

You seem like you might be the perfect person, given that you have got so many credit cards and almost all of them report $0 each month.

If you don't mind me asking, of your 25 (?) open cards, how many are,,,,

REPORTING $0 BUT ACTIVE, defined as...

     *  Have reported $0 every month for the last 8 months

     *  Have had a charge placed on them at least every 60 days

I can't micromanage it to that degree; I can tell you that all the cards except Care Credit get some use every month; ant that usually there are only from 2 to 6

reporting any balance.

REPORTING $0 BUT "INACTIVE", defined as....

     *  Have reported $0 every month for the last 8 months

     *  Have had no charges or payments of any kind made to them for the last 8 months

I don't have anything like that. I love all my cards equally

If you were to wait till your profile feels really stable,

which is never, because I can never resist the temptation to do something and monkey around... (example: earlier this evening I decided to monkey around with creating some balances for my 3 PLOC's to report  tomorrow... after doing that I realized it was dumb to play around with that since I'm still testing the installment loan thing...)

then take all the cards in the first group and place $5 on them and let them report, it would be interesting to see what alerts and reason codes and score changes happened in the next 40 days.

Then you could wait till things quieted down and a couple months later do the same thing with the cards in the second group.

I'm just not a candidate for anything like this

A slight tweak that feels right to me is that I would exclude from this test any cards that are less than 8 months old and also any that have never been used even once.  Such cards might behave strangely and would not be good test cases I think.

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