As said above the credit "score" is basically constructed to allow them to sell you credit monitoring products. Having an "excellent" or "999/1000" rating is meaningless as you can still get accepted or declined and virtually no organisations use the same score as a metric
Customers of CRA's will have a custom scorecard depending on their appetite for risk and that's what they'll use, together with manual review for a percentage of cases and appeals so I wouldn't be too excited or disheartened about scores being good or bad
Another thing is it's not just credit cards that report to CRA's, anything paid in credit - that could be monthly cat insurance, broadband, mobile phone bills etc will all report up as will loans, mortgages and the like
There are soft searches which confirm your identity and you'll get a lot of those when doing insurance quotes etc, and hard searches are ones that impact you more as other lenders see them - too many of those can make you look desperate for credit which is why they say don't apply to too many things especially when applying for mortgages
Utilisation of credit, amount of credit etc all affect how you are viewed but that is different to each organisation
It's often quite irresponsible, I don't utilise a lot of my credit but for some reason, even when I worked for a bank on the phones, I've always been given massive limits.
I remember in the early 2000's with a salary of £16k my first credit card had a limit of 6.5k and rose rapidly. I've got 3 now with limits above £15k but only ever put about £1000 on it any time, but they regularly put them up still. Wild really
Yeah , I saw a Youtube talk by the real guy they based the film Catch me If You can, the young fraudster (Abignail surname I think). It's a really interesting watch. However at the end he goes on Q&A about the best way to manage your money and he swore by the Credit card as basically you are not spending anything of your own money, you get a bill each month and as long as you clear it its fine You can get about 7 weeks free delay of having to part with your money. Also when there are problems its usually the card company that sort it out. As his 4 kids went through US higher Ed , he got them to work it this way and be disciplined. Anyway since then for the last 6 years I have pretty much done that. Obv have direct debits for the usual stuff, but out n about I spend on the card. Not worried about collecting points or anything. Totally works for me. I have 1 day a month where I pay it off and that takes 5 mins online. I am pretty sure the under 30's these days with the phone app linked directly to their card just spend more time than they need to checking bank balances multiple times a day
I'd rather check my balance regularly than once a month or even a week tbh, I like to know where I'm at financially but it also makes checking transactions for duplication, fraud or errors much easier
I do put most things through card but want to know regularly what is outstanding. I also make sure to use a cashback card as well as cashback sites as it's all money back in my pocket