Tip: Using a charge card for large purchases can help reduce the impact on your credit score, as charge cards are excluded
from utilization calculations.
-- Charge cards are excluded
from utilization calculations, so they might not help boost authorized users» credit as much as a traditional credit card.
-- Charge cards are excluded
from utilization calculations, so they might not help boost authorized users» credit as much as a traditional credit card.
Reducing the amount of available credit
from the utilization calculations can result in the remaining balances taking up a larger percentage of your remaining available credit and lowering or continuing to suppress your score.
This is why your suspicion that the American Express charge card won't help overcome the authorized user's lack of a «debt to credit ratio» is valid, since charge card balances are excluded
from utilization calculations.
Not exact matches
FICO, the organization that models credit scores, realizes this problem and excludes cards with no pre-set spending limit
from being part of the credit
utilization calculations.
Conversely, if the closed card has a lower percentage than the other card (s), it's helping your score — and thus could hurt it by being excluded
from combined
utilization calculations.
As you can see
from the above rules, the presence or absence of a credit limit will determine how that closed card influences your score — particularly in the combined
utilization calculations that look at your card usage in total.
If so, you could have removed some of your available credit (credit limit)
from the score's credit
utilization calculations, which is what occurs when balances on a closed cards reach zero.
However, charge cards are excluded
from credit
utilization calculations, rendering their score boosting effect limited.