@NattyPButter wrote:What's with this $2 trick I always be hearing about? I let $2 report on my credit report and I still see utilization at 0% but I see others say it should be rounded off to 1%. I rather it not show 0% since I've seen charts that show a score drop.
$2 != $0, it's really that simple unless the lender doesn't report the $2 (which some won't apparently now, I use $20 personally). The $2 trick orginated elsewhere but it is is valid.
FICO doesn't truncate this one, nor does it round down here unlike AAOA; if you have any reported balance at all you don't take the all $0's penalty which is a straight negative.
There have been some assertions made here on FICO's algorithm which aren't necessarily accurate; this is one case where it's demonstratable that FICO isn't rounding down but people tend to want to minimize chances and when tweaking the scores, tend to err on conservative estimates hence the old 1-9% that got pontificated here as commonplace here... it's a good answer in that it doesn't hurt anyone just not a fully accurate one in this case, but there's no real need to manage it that closely as anything reported will avoid the penalty.
@Thomas_Thumb wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:Revelate,
I get what you mean when you say utilization doesn't round down to the nearest integer like AAoA does, so does it round up?
For example, one trying to maintain a 9% overall utilization on $100k of available credit will want to keep their balances totaling $9000. Would $9500 reporting therefore show up as 10% utilization, effectively bumping that persons utilization from the "excellent" range to simply "good." What about $9100? Would that still be considered 9% utilization in the eyes of FICO or is anything over $9000, even a few bucks, in this illustration then considered to be 10% utilization?
It means anything over 9% (say 9.15%) rounds up to 10%. That being said, whatever happened to very good as opposed to simply good?
Most categorical presentations include very good.
I don't know that we have concrete data on rounding for utilization, though some folks reportedly got rounding up on their installment utilization so supposedly it's similar. For those of us managing our reported balances anyway not sure that really matters, but I do know I never got penalized for having absurdly minimal but non-zero utilization (well maybe 1 point on Beacon 5.0, I may have a sweetspot somewhere which I'll try to find later) as compared to having much higher individual tradeline utilization.
I will try to test out the single card case when I can on some rinky dinky secured card as I suspect that the round up / down will apply similarly on individual as it does on aggregate after I figure out individual breakpoints. I never did think to try it on the initial installment testing I did, didn't really have time with the mortgage in flight to do more than broadsword surgery.
BBS, I don't care what the 3rd party presentations say (which includes MF = FICO Consumer), it's all in what the score does in my opinion 
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