Fugality - from enforced to welcomed

[pony mom]

Yup. Paying it off on time leaves you without a history. I had trouble getting a different card a few years ago for that reason.

[rosarugosa]

I think it's possible your credit score is being adversely impacted by your utilization ratio if you only have 1 or 2 cards. We don't have a mortgage or any other debt, but we do have an untapped HELOC and a pile of credit cards, so our available credit is a very large number. At any given moment, we owe current month-to-date gas and grocery expenditures, which we pay off at the end of the month, but only represents a tiny number relative to available credit. Our current FICO is 856.
I open new cards for the sign-on bonuses and then often never use them again. Occasionally one is a winner though, like the Amex we opened last year that pays 3% on groceries and 2% on gas with no annual fee. That has become our primary card most of the time, although right now we're working on an initial spend to get a $200 bonus on another new card.

[Gardnr]

I could not believe I was turned down when I had the cash many times over and nothing negative in my history. Not carrying debt is considered a negative. Jeeeez Louise.

That happened to us 2y ago. We were ordering new furniture and a mattress set-planned to write a check (well CC for points and write the check the next month). They talked us into 2y no interest. We needed$8500. Oops, you only got approved for $5500. We laughed and laughed while they were mortified and couldn't understand our amusement. So we decided to come clean: we own 2 homes, we own 2 cars, we have no debt, we make 6 figures....who knew a credit score could drop 100 points for all of this success.

Outcome: we took the credit to get some activity and paid the rest as planned...CC followed by payoff next month.

We have sufficient cash "on hand" to cover life for 2years. We're not going to try to revive that 820.

[Gardnr]

but we do have an untapped HELOC .

Our HELOC was going to start charging us a monthly fee because we weren't using it. Hence we closed it up. Bank was NOT happy and tried to talk us into "home upgrade/remodel" or something to keep it going. Nope. Nadda. No thanks.

i suggest you check the terms of your HELOC so they don't surprise you with a fee.

[rosarugosa]

We haven't tapped our HELOC for 6 years and they haven't charged a fee. Actually, it's going to expire in a couple of months and I think I would like to open another line. We liked having the potential "just in case."