You will see a score increase across quite a few models, utilization decreases are the fastest way to raise Fico score.
The Fico score pie thats devoted to revolving utilization is 30% of your score. Fico calculates it overall, on each card and on how many of your cards have balances it also looks for individual cards that are maxed out (have a balance greater than 89% of the cards limit). Paying down your maxed out card first is advisable and then start paying off the cards until you only have 1 reporting a small balance no greater than 9% of its individual CL. You will have to experiment with the balance on that one card to find your sweet spot, everyone has a diff percentage between 1-9% that yields the greatest score possible. One other thing on utilization is this, there are buckets in Fico, carrying high utilization over long periods of time gets you bucketed in a lower scoring bucket, when you pay off the cards and get down to the one reporting it will take some time for you to get the most points possible as you have to be able to maintain that low utilization before Fico rebuckets you upward into a higher scoring bucket. In general you dont want a card to ever report more than 30% of its available credit to the CRAs.
@gen-specific wrote:Does dramatically lowering utilization immediately increase credit scores, across the models?
Or does the fact that you leveraged up ever at all keep your score lower.
Are you currently at "high utilization" on any cards? Your scores around 780 seem to say no.
Are you expecting to see high utilization for a while?
Ok, that's fun I guess, but it's Vantage, not FICO, right?
What are your scores from MyFICO?
edit: Yeah, I could see how swinging about $25k up or down on your open balances from one month to the next month would cause a 100 point shift. That's a lot of shock to the scoring models. Forget the utilization percentages, it's just a lot of money to move.
Where is your TU 780 score from?
Edit: Actually, anyone who is running that kind of spend through their account in the interest of generating points is already planning to pay the amount off before the statement cuts, to avoid such a hit to their FICO score. The wild swings in the score simply prove that the score adjusts rapidly to large changes in value, not that it is a good strategy.
Letting that level of change in your FICO get rolled through as a SP inquiry is risky, because many of your existing CCC do a regular SP, and that kind of a drop in FICO, that kind of a spike in dollars outstanding, could lead to AA. Chase, US Bank, Barclays and others have already shown they don't like shocks to the information they see in their cardholders reports, and will take action if their automated scoring model freaks out because of it. Not that they always do, but they certainly can.
It depends on where your utilization is at currently, I mean if your at 15% and you drop to 7% I don't expect a big jump.
But now if your at like 80% and you drop it to 7% then I would expect to see a ~50 point jump!
