If I add up all my available credit on revolving accounts, I have more than $90,000 available. This includes a number of cards I never use such as Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. Based on this figure, I have used 65% of my available credit. But, on the major cards (Master Card and Visa), I have about $65,000 in available credit and have used about 91% of this available credit. Which one of these is used when calculating FICO? Which one is used by credit card companies when they make a decision on whether or not to extend credit?
According to a FICO supervisor (Barry Peperno) I talked with... BOTH! He would not tell me which is more important, but from experience, it seems that if you have one account maxed out it can make a great shift than the overall. It's the reason I stay away from cards like Capital One who never reports your true credit limit... Looks like you're 100% of the limit and lowers your score as much as the positive tradeline helps.
I just opened todays mail. I got a 714 FICO from TU. This is the first report to get cleaned up. My only negative is my high ratio. All in all, not bad. The other two reports should be cleaned up in the next few weeks and I can get my scores from them at that time. This is the first time I checked my FICO
