What's more important for score, re: utility

[toothgrind3r]

Curious as to what's more important for your score...overall utility across all cards, or induvidual card utility?

[toothgrind3r]

...grrrr....I mean utilization 

[Anonymous]

Overall utilization is King to individual card utilization.

[HeavenOhio]

Individual card utilization is secondary, but it's important enough to consider. It's determined by the card with the highest utilization. If a card is maxed, one loses a boatload of points.

When strategizing, it's not necessary to choose between one or the other because all payment options will address overall utilization. If there's a choice to be made, it'd be between individual card utilization and number/percentage of cards reporting non-zero balances. Which one of those offers the better scoring advantage is a lot less clear.

[toothgrind3r]

Thanks the two of you!

So if I was looking for a quick little boost, I'd want to focus on my highest card utilization, yeah?

For instance, my overall at the moment is about 23%

But I have one at 70%, one at 50% and the rest at 0-30%

Now that I typed that out, I realize how silly my question is! Of course I want to get those big ones down! 

[Anonymous]

Yes, you'd want to start with the highest.  Putting dollars toward your 70% utilization card verses putting dollars verses a 30% utilization card is going to lower overall utilization equally; a $500 paydown on the 70% utilization card for example may lower overall utilization 10%.  If that's the case, it will also lower overall utilization 10% if you put that $500 toward the 30% utilization card.  The difference here however is that $500 on the 70% utilization card will result in dropping the utilization on your highest utilization card, possibly lowering that across a threshold.  This could mean a greater score gain.  It's also important to consider card limits here.  If your 70% utilization card has a credit limit that's 5X smaller than your 30% utilization card, any payment made toward the 70% utilization card will have 5X the impact utilization percentage wise that it would on the 30% utilization card.  Of course, the converse would also be true.  Hopefully that makes sense.

If you list out all of your cards with their current balances and limits it would be easier to give real world numbers as examples rather than making them up.  It's totally up to you if you'd like to provide those numbers for us to comment on.

[toothgrind3r]

Your explination helps a ton, thank you!

[SouthJamaica]

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@toothgrind3r wrote:

Thanks the two of you!

So if I was looking for a quick little boost, I'd want to focus on my highest card utilization, yeah?

For instance, my overall at the moment is about 23%

But I have one at 70%, one at 50% and the rest at 0-30%

Now that I typed that out, I realize how silly my question is! Of course I want to get those big ones down! 

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IMHO you'd getting the quickest boost by getting the two outliers down to 28%.