I don't think you understand credit scores if you think that's minimal. Having even one card is an enormous boost. And four years of history is not bad either. I graduated college with no credit history and couldn't get a non-secured credit card at all, despite proof of a six figure salary.

That's not minimal credit history, that's quite a bit of credit history.

It doesn't matter how many times you swipe your card, you can get a card and never use it and and still counts for your credit history. The point being you have credit available to you but you aren't using it. You have four years of not running up your credit card, that's huge.

Is it? I was under the assumption that credit history was based on actual payment amounts and the amount paid back, instead of just paying it back. From that I assumed the ~100 or so $4 purchases each I made wouldn't matter much.

EDIT: Huh, apparently I've been ill-informed about credit history [1]. Guess I've been a dumbo and one of today's lucky 10,000.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/188xmi/is_...

You assumed very, very wrong.

FICO is based on your credit utilization (amount owed vs credit limit), history of repayment, mix of types of accounts (this has a minimal impact), number of new accounts, number of credit inquiries (aka hard pulls, this is also minimal), and length of credit history.

You had credit available to you for four years and you manage it very, very well.

Other scoring algorithms besides FICO may weigh different things differently but FICO is currently used in most lending decisions so it's what matters for now.

Yep, totally assumed higher loans -> higher repayment -> better ability to repay -> better credit. Definitely not as simplistic as I thought, thank you (and thedufer!) for making me realize this. Yay for accidental good debt management!

Think about it, someone who owes $50,000 and is making minimum payments every month is a lot more likely to default on a loan than someone who borrows a few hundred a month once in a while.

If you want to see your real Experian FICO 8 credit score for free you can do so at freecreditreport.com which is a site now owned by Experian. They break down each part of your credit score and grade you on each. (A-F)