This is called
the your debt utilization percentage and accounts for a large part of your FICO score.
So, if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans but you're not carrying a balance on your credit cards,
your debt utilization percentage will be low, which is good for your credit score.
Not exact matches
Simply by shifting existing
debt around to reduce the
utilization percentage on individual cards you can expect to increase the score by a few points or more — particularly when bringing all cards to below 50 percent — yet it's going to take an actual reduction in your overall
debt to drop that combined
utilization to where your score rises significantly.
To more accurately gauge your risk of nonpayment, the widely used FICO scoring model not only looks at overall
debt in comparison to total credit limits, «the scoring formula also looks at
utilization on the individual cards that make up the overall
utilization percentage,» says Barry Paperno, consumer operations manager at myFICO.com.
We all know that rising revolving
debt, as reflected in higher
utilization percentage, can be bad news for your score — just as having no recently reported open revolving credit can also be a hindrance.
Although the
percentage of the overall score that each one of those variables accounts for varies from person to person based on a variety of reasons, including how long a person has had credit, 65 % of the score, on average, is made up by payment history and the amount of
debt owed relative to credit limits, or credit
utilization.
Because too much revolving
debt — also known as credit card
debt — increases your
utilization rate, or the
percentage of available credit you use.
By closing a credit card account, you reduce your available credit — making it more difficult to keep your
debt - to - credit
utilization ratio below 30 % (the recommended
percentage).
Credit
utilization is directly related to qualifying for mortgage and most lenders will not issue a loan if existing
debt payments are more than a certain allowable
percentage.
People who carry credit card
debt have higher credit
utilization ratios — the
percentage of their credit limits they're using.
A high credit card balance can result in a higher credit
utilization ratio, which is the
percentage of outstanding
debt in comparison to your available credit line.
Plus, if you've accrued large amounts of
debt over time or you've come close to maxing out your credit cards, you may have a high credit
utilization ratio, which is the
percentage of your credit limit you actually use.
The key
percentage is called the credit
utilization ratio: how much
debt you have compared to how much available credit.