Rebuilding Your Credit

[KeithW]

While I realize that Transrisk isn't FICO it does seem to rougly move up and down the same so I use it daily to track my progress with Credit Karma. Then I pull my FICO every few months and check it.

I recently bought a new car and went from a 22% interest rate on our old car to a 5% rate on the new one. I also in the past seven months got two new credit cards.

Doing these three things have hurt my Transrisk score somewhat. It seems the main reason is that it made my Average Age of OPEN Accounts too new. I have lots of really old accounts that are closed and those don't seem to matter since they only go by open accounts.

They say that my credit utilization being 35% is pretty good and that my ontime payments being 99% isn't bad and that my AAOOA is kind of bad.

I am fighting to get my score up by next Spring/Summer so we can get a construction loan and it surprises me that having a perfect payment history for over 3 years and a reasonably low utiliztion aren't helping me more. I am still in the low 600s.

I tried having my wife add me to her Target card which is a 4 year old card, but after 2 months it hasn't shown up on my credit report, which isn't a surprise since all they asked for was my name and no other personal info.

[Shogun]

I would assume that the decrease in your car loan interest rate is indicative of the improvement of your CR.  Keep doing what you're doing!

[KeithW]

Does the true FICO score only go by the age of your open accounts or does it go by the age of all the accounts on your report?

[Shogun]

Closed accounts count too.  Paid closed accounts in good standing will stay on your account for 10 years.

[creditnocash]

i belive it counts all. 

after 10 years or reporting closed the account falls off your reports. 

and 7 years for baddies from dod.