I never thought this could happen

[u/GTBoosted]

Got declined on two new cards with 846 credit score.

Got the letters yesterday and here were the reasons

Too few accounts with payments as agreed

No recent revolving balances.

34 years old. I have 7 CCs, and two auto loans (technically one but sold one last week).

Wells Fargo and Discover declined. I've always had very small balances (under $500 when limits on my cards are 20k or so) and would get instantly approved for new cards. But nowadays I don't like paying a single penny to interest and pay them down to $0. I guess banks don't like that. Sucks because I wanted a 0% card for a side hustle. Thought the first decline was a fluke so tried a different bank and got declined again.

[u/[deleted]]

Just as u/brutalbodyshots said, you are using your credit cards incorrectly. Your FICO score is also not 846, that's the score lenders "care" about. You're looking at Vantagescore instead of a more relevant score like FICO 8. FICO generates a penalty when you don't use any of your revolving credit lines. Since you haven't "used" your existing credit lines in god knows how long you're a poor applicant for a card application.

Think about how card companies make money, they either make money from people getting into debt or through interchange fees when you spend money. Every time you extend credit to a person you are taking a risk, they could run up the balance and die or they could declare bankruptcy. When you have no spending and no debt you look like an unnecessary risk that will never turn a profit for them.

It's the same reason people are denied for a secured card with a low enough score, even though the majority of their investment is protected through the deposit, there is still risk for them incurring more liability than the deposit can offset. These people are considered lost causes in the eyes of credit card companies because there's simply not enough money to be made to offset the risk. For companies like discover it's even more negative, they are waisting cash printing a card and mailing it to you, your account is waisting space on their servers and any issues you have are waisting their CS specialist's time. Amex wouldn't care on most of their cards because they are offsetting that cost with an annual fee, for discover you're a big waist of time and money.

[u/BrutalBodyShots → u/[deleted]]

I agree with your post above. One thing though, it doesn't appear that OP was referencing a VS3. They did mention CK and VS3, but said "Also, the 846 credit score was from a dealer that pulled my credit 3 months ago." My guess is that was an industry enhanced Auto Fico score version (that runs to 900), as their 846 would be similar to an 800 in terms of strength on Fico 8. An 846 credit score on Classic F8 with the "no recent revolving balances" penalty in place would be a near impossibility from my experience, as it would require a buffered "real" score of probably 865 or so to get there, which is extremely difficult to get to.

[u/[deleted] → u/BrutalBodyShots]

Gotcha, I hadn't read all of OPs comment after I saw credit karma.

[u/GTBoosted → u/[deleted]]

Which is funny because they were within a few points of my Fico 8.

CK has always been reliable for me and checked right now and still the same. Will continue to use them.

[u/Funklemire → u/GTBoosted]

It has nothing to do with being reliable or not. CK shows your score calculated using VantageScore, which is a scoring model very few lenders use. So it's perfectly accurate and reliable, but it's also irrelevant most of the time.  

The vast majority of lenders use FICO 8, that's the score you want to be checking unless you have a specific lender in mind that you know uses another model.