Used over $100,000 in credit, here is what happened to my score

Question

Inspired by the guy that talked about how mortgage troubles affected his score (I think he lost his house), I felt inspired to talk about the largely inconsequential wild fluctuations in my credit score In January I went from about 0% utilization to about 65% utilization. The average age of my accounts are 2 years and 5 months. It's just an average. This hasn't all reported yet, credit karma currently reports 55% utilization. My Vantage Scores went from 770 down to 554 in 30 days. This is a 216 point drop. Vantage Score you laugh, well I also have opened some accounts as part of this process and have therefore received the scores the lender actually pulled during my credit evaluations, which I have to assume are FICO, these so far have been 663 or so.  It is also entirely probable that the lenders have scores that were last updated a few months ago, so I get to assume the worst. The actual cash I pulled from the cards is sitting tight as it is all 0% interest balance transfers. I'll let you all know if Macy's (my lowest limit card) gets spooked and gives me another credit limit decrease, hysterical. I haven't updated my signature in a while, those limits are not accurate any longer. The point is to let you guys know which one of these creditors can actually make good on the credit they've extended to you, and which ones will likely pull the lifeline when you actually need it  the theory is that a lot of you guys are wasting your time here trying to get above-average credit, or maybe even to the place where I am with limits, so we'll see if it's worth it!

Answer 1

gen-specific wrote:
American Express just unilaterally closed the card I have with them, this was a $30,000 line, so this ironically greatly increases the ulitization of my open lines, which will lower my score further! Unless I start deleveraging ASAP, which I won't but I can see this turning into a cascading credit network failure, as now my utilization is higher and the next lender(s) may find that more risky. Protip: American Express will not follow through when you actually need credit. So, enjoy those 3x CLI soft pulls, but they mean nothing as AMEX is not actually granting you anything but a number. Remember guys, I voluntarily dropped by credit score 218 points in the course of 30 days. I expect the equation to rebalance upwards 218 points when I voluntarily raise my credit score. (I've done similar things in a less drastic way before, and the score recalculates back upwards, instead of gradually over time, but I'll chronicle that process here too) If I'm going to play this game, I want to know which one of my lenders are strong, and which ones are weak. And in what order they renege on available credit. I want all those people complaining about arbitrary 6 point changes in their credit score, to know what is worthwhile and what is not.Not surprised that Amex closed. They are really spend centric on the charge card side but conservative and react quickly when you appear to carry increaising balances elsewhere. I've put 60k on Amex which is well above all of my revolving CLs combined but I don't revolve anything. I suspect if I started to revolve elsewhere my spend ability woulld drastically shrink. It's an interesting experiment you are doing because it will statistically look a lot like bust out fraud and a lot of large banks are monitoring those metrics. There is a non-significant possibility you could see major AA. Hopefully you will get csr/underwriter calls first rather than a shoot first response.