>>1921988Credit mix also impacts your score and having no credit card is always worse than having a credit card simply because of the mix requirement, so actually yes, it is a clear cut credit card victory. You just have to understand how the system works. Getting the card in the first place will ding your credit by about 20 points because of the hard pull, that recovers by about 10 points within a few months. Recently some scoring systems have started to have a 2 year "memory" of hard pulls (used to be just 1 across the board), but regardless once those hard pulls fall off the report you are, in a clear cut way, better off with the card than without, from a score point of view.
Also unless you're on some ghetto starter card it should be pretty rare that you approach 100% of your limit on a billing cycle. If you are on a ghetto starter card, your credit was so fucked that simply not having any late payments is going to do better for you than worrying about utilization ratio. Once you're out of ghetto mode, your credit line is going to be high enough that you don't need to think about it unless you're buying a BMC or a Rolex or something. Your monthly spend simply won't be able to touch the credit limit under normal conditions. And even if it does, having the credit mix and the good behavior history is going to outweigh the utilization ratio. You really only need to think about utilization ratio in the 2-3 months before the mortgage application because that is the only time it will ever matter, it has a very short time horizon unlike the process of applying, getting approved, and then waiting for the hard pulls to vanish from the report, which takes long term planning.
