Almost back to 850 F8s!

Knocking on the door of at least two 850s on F8... EQ/TU. The main difference between the 3 scores you see below is that EQ/TU each have 1 scoreable inquiry, where EX has 4. I'd imagine my EX score would be similar to the other 2 if I had 3 less scoreable inquiries there. AoYRA is currently 6 months for these scores and this is with 4 new accounts in the last 6-9 months.

Congratulations on your score increases! Those are healthy points considering your new accounts and those extra HP inquiry on EX.

AllZero wrote: ↑Wed Feb 02, 2022 10:37 pm Congratulations on your score increases! Those are healthy points considering your new accounts and those extra HP inquiry on EX.

3 out of 4 of my EX inquiries fall off at the same time, so I'll be able to do a pull right after that happens and have an apples to apples comparison with all 3B having just 1 scoreable inquiry. Well, maybe not... if I take another EQ inquiry for that Affinity card... we'll see

Nice!

I'll have to revisit my AAoRA / AAoA and see if I think there's a potential threshold point upcoming that could bring me to 850 on EQ/TU in the upcoming months. If not, my guess is that in June when those inquiries become unscoreable I'll once again reach 850 on both.

Congrats! I have serious score envy.

I recently got my first 850 — TU9 — and I have mixed feelings about it. The satisfaction is real and strong. But also, testing is fun and being at the cap makes testing essentially impossible. What’s a curious hobbyist to do? I get the impression you have confronted this dilemma several times. What are your thoughts on the matter?

That's a good question, @Justaguy . I think it depends on how long you've experienced 850s for to be honest. The thrill of first getting there is fantastic and once there it's definitely something I wanted to maintain for a bit. Like anything though, the honeymoon eventually ends. I arrived there in May of 2018 and tried to maintain them for a while, unnecessarily implementing AZEO when it of course it didn't matter. I ended up going over 4 years without opening an account, so eventually even with an unoptimized file I could still pin the needle on many scores. There are still plenty of them though that I never topped out, like the mortgage scores, the ever-elusive 900 on EQ BCE8, BCE9s, etc. so testing could still be done on those even with Classic 8/9 scores maxed. It definitely did take me a while to concede to another spree in the middle of 2021 after having gone so long without apping and enjoying a nice set of scores. I then looked at the bright side of it though from testing purposes... sort of "let me see how much a spree will drop my 28 scores..." and then "let me see how long it takes those 28 scores to rebound..." or "how many of those scores can I max out again inside of my youngest account reaching 1 year." I do like having greater flexibility for testing though at this stage of the game. Is your profile optimized in order to grab an 850, or can you get there outside of that? For testing that doesn't involve reported balances often one can avoid 850s by rolling with a lot of [naturally] reported balances. After testing out my $32,900 Citi card for AZEO penalty on EX2 I'm going to head back to all accounts with a reported balance and just let it roll natural. In doing that, most of my maxed scores (outside of EX Classics that don't care about AWB) will probably come in enough below max to allow for testing still.