You've been saying the same bad advice up and down this thread.

If you reliably pay your credit card bills in full by the due date, your score climbs and climbs. Not instantly, over time. Reliability isn't a one-off.

If you cancel your credit card, you have less evidence that other institutions are happy to lend to you, and your score could go down.

If you apply for a new credit card, your score can go down because that's also what people who are running out of money do, not because your borrowing to limit percentage is low.

The highest credit scores are for people who have been loaned plenty of money, and who always make their payments.

Deliberately causing them to charge you interest just makes you poorer and does not show that you're a good risk to loan to. It's the front door for ballooning debt, and that's what they want none of - people who get declared bankrupt or have other debt interventions are a massive loss to them, and what they want to avoid like the plague.

The bigger impact than credit utilization would be the hard inquiry that they use to determine whether to give you the card as well as the avg age of accounts. Low credit utilization may drop your score an extremely tiny amount (only like 1 or 2 points) but the new inquiry and lowering avg age of accounts is a much bigger impact (tens to dozens of pts drop)

Credit utilization /= carrying a balance. I put most purchases and payments on CCs, pay them off completely every month, and my credit utilization is typically something like 10% without paying a cent in interest, and I have an excellent credit score.

From years and years of first-hand experience, there may be a swing of a couple 10s of points when you get closer to that 30% utilization, but it has nothing to do with whether you are carrying a balance and paying interest. Further, that 20 or 30 points basically background noise when it comes to qualifying for new credit.

People get so fucking hung up on whether this or that will change your score by 15 points and how that signals some grand conspiracy. Open a line of credit or two, use it responsibly to demonstrate that you can manage access to that credit--pay on time and in full--it really is that simple.

This is incorrect and I'm not sure why you're trying to die on this hill everywhere in this thread. Look bro, of you're upset you're carrying a balance and you didn't have to be because someone lied to you, I get that. But when you're confronted with real facts, you're supposed to reevaluate the situation.

Credit cards also report monthly. What balance you have when they report, may not be what it is when you pay your bill. So if your limit is $1,000 and they report when your account has $1,000 spent, theyre reporting 100% utilization. But if report day is 3 days before you make your payment of $1,000 it's still being reported that way and not $0.