Discover FICO

[longtimelurker]

Just logged on to the Discover site for the first time in many months (I have a Discover IT Miles which is useless after the first year).  It shows my TU FICO Score

and indicates that I have 1 inq.   Clicking on that, it says:

Good

Having some new credit requests is generally considered good

I guess "generally considered good" is pretty nebulous, but AFAIK, there is no SCORE merit to having any inqs, right?

[wasCB14]

"Your mix of credit is considered exceptional"

...in the sense I've never had anything but CCs?

0 TU inquiries gives me: "Having fewer new credit requests is considered very good"

[dragontears]

I have 2 TU inquiries and don't get that

[longtimelurker]

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@dragontears wrote:
I have 2 TU inquiries and don't get that

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OK, so we have the pattern:

0 inqs: Very good

1 inq: Good

More than 1, no comment.

And that it what I would have expected, just the wording of the "1" case makes it sound as if it is better than 0...

[wasCB14]

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@longtimelurker wrote:

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@dragontears wrote:
I have 2 TU inquiries and don't get that

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OK, so we have the pattern:

0 inqs: Very good

1 inq: Good

More than 1, no comment.

And that it what I would have expected, just the wording of the "1" case makes it sound as if it is better than 0...

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I read it as

Good

Having some (but not a lot of) new credit requests is generally considered good (not that bad, not that great)

[Kforce]

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@longtimelurker wrote:

Good

Having some new credit requests is generally considered good

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Political correctness makes the truth hard to see

[Kree]

Can't they use the word few?  it would be clearer.  Having 'few' new credit requests is generally considered good.

[MrDisco99]

Heh. My credit score card says for 8 inquiries:

Poor - Recently seeking and obtaining a lot of new credit is often seen as high credit risk behavior by lenders.

[longtimelurker]

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@Kforce wrote:

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@longtimelurker wrote:

Good

Having some new credit requests is generally considered good

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Political correctness makes the truth hard to see

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Yes, I see how that follows.  Well, I'll pretend I do.

(And, off-topic: I hate the term "political correctness" which IMO often means "I don't care about that particular group/thing/issue" whereas the same people are frequently just as "correct" and assertive about things they do value....)

[Anonymous]

The takeaway point here is that any credit monitoring system that supplies you with claims about what you are doing right (i.e. positive coaching) is highly unreliable.  (Also letter grades like A or B or Excellent and Very Good)  That's true for every CMS out there, including the myFICO Ultimate 3B.  The claims that the CMS is making is just the opinion of some guy who wrote the summary software.  The algorithm is not generating these statements.

More reliable are the (typically four) negative reason statements that follow a FICO score.  These are claims about what is hurting your score and are generated by the algorithm.  They can still be worded in a misleading way, but they are more likely to be right.

The Discover statement given by the OP is false.  The wording as given clearly implies that one inquiry is better than zero.  But this is common -- every CMS out there has false and misleading statements made up by some guy who designed it.