What is the weight of my student loans on my credit?

[Anonymous]

Hey, 

Does anyone know what the weight of student loans has on fico scores? is it a good debt or bad debt?

Have about 18k in private student loans and about 7k thru the state.

[pakman92]

having a student loan does not hurt your credit score provided that it is in good standing with no late payments.  in fact having no installment loan at all hurts your score.  looks like you,ve paid down the principle quite a bit.  im going to venture to guess that this is actually helping your score. YMMV

[NGeorge]

I'm confused about this one too... I have been though a credit rebuilding journey and have around 60k in private student loans--and many, many people have said "Oh, student loans don't really count since so many people have them--as long as they are in good standing, you will be fine".

I have brought my credit score up into the low 700's and American Express *STILL* won't give me a card because of "high remaining balances on installment debt", HSBC  and B of A won't increase my credit limits on my existing cards past $1000 -- I can't even get the damn things refinanced into one large 60k private loan (right now they are in 3 chunks--2 by National Collegiate Trust and 1 by RBS Citizens Bank) to lower the payments -- all because of the same reason. I even tried to refinance directly through RBS Citizens and they wouldn't do it--same reason! As part of my credit rebuilding I paid off my car, and have been putting that money into the student loans. That is the only installment debt I have! My cards are sitting at about a 20% utilization ratio.

Because of the variable interest on the private loans (I got them when my credit score was in the high 500's when I was in school and they were writing them for people that low) I have probably only been able to pay down about 2 grand in principal over the last 2 years.

So it's NOT entirely true that student loans will not affect your credit--I have no idea how much I am going to have to get these damn things paid down before I am stopping being told my balances are too high. What is so amazing to me is that with a score in the low 700's I can't even find a bank to refinance them--to make the payments lower--which would free up more of my money each month--and make it even EASIER and LESS RISKY to pay the loans monthly.

Nat

[NGeorge]

I should add that these loans were initially dispersed in 2007, and I've been paying on them for a little over 2 years (with some deferrments in between) so around 27 payments total.

Nat

[aot2009]

If you have several loans showing on your report they are treated as seperate accounts. If you default at all because of a (student deferment late) they will mark all the loans as defaulted so it will look like all accounts were late.

They hurt your AAoA if they are seperate accounts.

They hurt you because of the balances.

They are treated as a normal account they are what they are an installment loan.

Don't think they don't affect your score because they do.