[USER]

I get “FICO” score updates from a couple of financial institutions, Wells and Amex. I don’t really pay much attention to it as I have a high 800s score.

BUT, the past 3-4 months, been spending a lot on 1 particular CC. The utilization on that has gone over 50% and pretty close to 100% at one point.

The CC is paid off every month, so it’s a free “loan” and we get the points.

When you look at the overall credit utilization, then it’s very little, like 1%. (This is all my available credit combined and used vs. the above where it’s just 1 CC)

What’s interesting is that this high utilization on a single card has impacted my credit score a lot more than I would imagine.

Now I’m in the low/mid 800s. Not a big deal, but I find it very interesting. Nothing else has changed in terms of payments, loans, etc. So it has to be the CC usage.

One other note. This CC is opened by my spouse, so it’s under their SS.

I have a card too, but it’s hitting my FICO score! Just weird.

We don’t check my spouse’s score so don’t know if anything is happening over there.

[Mike]

Similar to you, I watch my score jump up and down when all I’m doing is putting spend on travel cards that get paid off every month.

Just funny that any time you really use a credit line they gave you, it smashes your score for a month or two.

It’s also funny to see the wildly different scores between models.

End of the day, once you’re over a 720, anything big a lender’s gonna care far more about debt to income ratio.

I’m sitting here watching my various score services randomly report, or fail to report, my series of new CITI cards. Wheeeee!

[Jule]

You can call a raise your limit for the card you use the most.

[Russell]

FICO scores are just proof that even in industries you’d expect to be precise and highly professional, “easy” beats “effective” most of the time.

It’s a downright silly algorithm that isn’t particularly good at being predictive and has so many easily reproduced effects like the one you noticed that clearly aren’t actually telling anyone anything about your credit worthiness.

Is a credit score a thing that should exist? Absolutely, though probably with a narrower use case than FICO scores have bled into.

But the FICO score has a first mover advantage, and there’s little appetite by the industry to replace it with an actually useful score.

[Author]

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