AAoA effect on score.

[Anonymous]

I have had tax liens on my report and they were always listed as the number one negative affecting my score, even when the last one was 9 years and 11 months old. The last one dropped on the first of Feb and my score went from 699 to 711. However I also noticed that this week my AAoA went to 7 years, so not sure how the points were distributed.

I'm not sure about collections, but I do know that unpaid tax liens stay on for 10 years and I have seen all of mine consistently fall off right at the 10 year mark. Mine were with the State and every year they would file a new lien, which was part of the old one. I never owed the money as I had sent in my payments, but was just stupid and didn't file the returns. In the end I actually got a few bucks back when I finally got around to filing the returned is in '07. They had remained on my report as unpaid, which I decided not to contest once they were released. TU decided to verify it and sure enough, since that one was showing paid in Sept '07, it will remain on TU until Sept 2014. EQ and EX still had them reporting as unpaid, so they did fall off at the ten year mark.

That being said, even when the TU lien was reporting as updated in Sept '07, we started the loan process on a house in Oct '07 and my TU from the lender at that time was 746. I had many years of very positive history and while I don't know what my AAofA was then, I do know it was longer than it is today. Between 2008 and 2009 I had a number of accounts without any negative info just drop off. In my refi attempts over the past 13 months, my TU from lenders had gone down into the 720's, but my lender pulled it two days ago and it was back up to 746. It's odd because TU is the one with sometihng negative on it, but EQ is 711.  Back in '05 and '06, EQ used to always be signficantly higher than TU and EX. I had 720's with them back then and there was negative stuff on there.

Home values came up from their lows here, so I have been obsessed with my scores for the last 90 days. Now that the refi at 4.875 is all secure, I don't care that much what FICO says. To a certain extent it's a pride thing, but you get to a point where you have all the credit you need and it just doesn't matter that much. Oddly enough, I think when you get to that point is when scores are the highest. According to these simulators, I'll be above 760 in the next year without doing anything other than paying my bills on time, which I have done for 10 years (outside of an accident of paying a cc with the wrong account online over 7 years ago).

[haulingthescoreup]

Wow, I'd hate like heck to give up an older card and drop back down to 1 year AAoA. It takes forever to regain age.

How old exactly is the 120? In other words, how long before it falls off? You said something about 6-7 years --did you mean waiting that long, or is the late that old?

And do you know for sure that the entire account would be deleted with a PFD? Technically, a PFD means deleting the baddie, not the entire account, although you have to be prepared for the worst. Is the account still open? If the account is still open, it will still report. If it's closed, it should keep going for X number of years (see below.)

Normally, with a more typical credit profile of 12-18 total TL's with maybe 6-8 open, I'd say let the old account go. But if you only have two, and this one is so much older than the other, I'm thinking that it's worth gritting your teeth and holding on. Once the late falls off (7 - 7 1/2 years after it happened), the account itself SHOULD remain for 10 years after it was closed, although you never know with Equifax.