score_building wrote:you may get more responses to this post in the
Understanding FICO® Scoring forum.
This is already in the right forum, the same one you are stating.
urgent_help_needed wrote:
haulingthescoreup posted something in another thread which stated that there are scoring buckets for average age of the accounts, and that she thought that one of the thresholds was when you cross below average age of 5 or 6 years you fall into a lower bucket.
I appreciated that post and it got me wondering about the details of AAoA buckets. I remember somebody once posted a graph of utilization versus credit score that shows how your FICO goes down as utilization crosses various thresholds. I appreciated that graph and was wondering if there was more details out there about where the various AAoA thresholds were?
I will be applying for some more credit cards in the future and this info would help me decide how many to apply for.
Buckets are a weird animal, I would like to see how this goes and compare to my own experiences and see if I have the right strategy going. 
I figure if I let me accounts age, avoid new ones unless they substantially increase my ratio, avoid closing old account unless absolutely necessary and avoid baddies and get rid of any baddie, keep util down, little to no inquiry, that should put me a pretty sweet bucket but it has been unstable to say the least. The current market isn't helping either.
Guardian wrote:
score_building wrote:
you may get more responses to this post in theUnderstanding FICO® Scoring forum.
This is already in the right forum, the same one you are stating.
I moved it here from CC's. One of our mobile threads!
Guardian wrote:
Buckets are a weird animal, I would like to see how this goes and compare to my own experiences and see if I have the right strategy going.
Weird, indeed. We do a lot of sniffing around with these things, and we think we figure something out. We strut proudly around for a couple of months, until we see something that blows all our guesses right out of the water.
We do know that there are 2 negative and 8 positive buckets.
My latest guesses: there's a negative bucket for a serious derog OR a public record, and a negative bucket for a serious derog AND a public record. Serious derog = CA, CO, 120-day, 90-day, 60-day less than 2 years. (The others count for the whole time they're on the reports.) Public record = BK, judgment, tax lien. (OK, what am I forgetting...)
Then, let's see, we haven't kicked around the age thing in a while. Again, my guesses: under 2 years; 2 - under 5 years; 5 - under 8; 8 - under 12 (under 13?); 12 (13?) - under 19; 19 years +. Then maybe one for thin files? And maybe another for more than X new accounts within the last year???
And this doesn't address when the longest history or the AAoA drives the bucket assignment.
Plus whenever we throw something like this up there, someone pops up with convincing indications that every single thing listed is wrong.
Even without knowing what the ages are for the buckets, Timothy had a good approach: he said never to add so much new credit that it drops your AAoA a year (or more.) Even though we can figure AAoA in YY/MM, it's the whole years that show on our reports. So if your AAoA is 6 years 1 month, for instance, be very careful going for new credit, because it could easily drop you to 5 years-something. Wait until you're 6 years 9 months, do the math first, and then proceed with caution.
Speaking as someone whose scores dropped 75 points after a much-needed and much-planned app spree, this is hard on the soul.
eta: OK, I'm not positive about #4, AU on a closed card. I think it counts though. And thank you for answering a question I asked on another thread, whether closed cards would continue to report on an AU's reports!
eta again: per fused (next page) #4 is included in AAoA.
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