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This is pure speculation, but I wonder also if major lenders, who do occasional soft pulls, might retain historical information even if it has since disappeared from your current report. They certainly have a motivating financial interest to retain everything they can, if they think it's useful to judge you with.
I don't know if they can do that for someone who isn't their client though. I've read that when sending "preapproved" offers, they just pay for a list of people who meet some general criteria, without getting your full report. I don't know if that's only for cost or also for legal reasons. I'm not sure if they are allowed to soft pull a person's individual details if they don't have a relationship with you. If not, then the only way they'd be able to deduce a history when you apply, would be by looking at some of the reported details people mentioned above.
@Mrm-na wrote:This is pure speculation, but I wonder also if major lenders, who do occasional soft pulls, might retain historical information even if it has since disappeared from your current report. They certainly have a motivating financial interest to retain everything they can, if they think it's useful to judge you with.
I don't know if they can do that for someone who isn't their client though. I've read that when sending "preapproved" offers, they just pay for a list of people who meet some general criteria, without getting your full report. I don't know if that's only for cost or also for legal reasons. I'm not sure if they are allowed to soft pull a person's individual details if they don't have a relationship with you. If not, then the only way they'd be able to deduce a history when you apply, would be by looking at some of the reported details people mentioned above.
Given infinite time and space: not only will it happen, it already has. Storage and computing power is so cheap these days (and given enough time by infinite monkey theory they'll be able to optimize it) and they'll use it. It's just not hard to do technically and it's no longer expensive to do so either: ergo, they do it now or they will in very short future.
Edit: anecdotally we've seen a few cases where people with a pattern of high utilization may get rebucketed, but this is very rare and generally cleans up after a few months anyway in the ones I've read about. One month spikes I've never heard nor seen it happen.
So so sorry I did not see the reply asking to see an image of what I was talking about. Here is a link to the image.
@92235 wrote:So so sorry I did not see the reply asking to see an image of what I was talking about. Here is a link to the image.
I believe that's what Guin was referring to: balance and amount paid, rather than a straight utilization metric.
FICO NextGen might take payments into account: you'd think they would want to really both from a risk and a profit perspective, everyone wins on that one including us consumers in my estimation; however, until it gets moved into the mainline FICO versions other than possible and very rare bucketing incidents (which I'm not entirely sold on from reports), revolving utilization is instant-in-time only.
It looks like I cut it off, but it does list my credit limits by date. Here is what it says:
Credit limit of $3,200 from 05/2011 to 10/2011; $4,000 from 11/2011 to 11/2012; $6,500 from 12/2012 to 10/2013
So it wouldn't be difficult for them to do a simple calculation to get utilization by month.
@92235 wrote:It looks like I cut it off, but it does list my credit limits by date. Here is what it says:
Credit limit of $3,200 from 05/2011 to 10/2011; $4,000 from 11/2011 to 11/2012; $6,500 from 12/2012 to 10/2013
So it wouldn't be difficult for them to do a simple calculation to get utilization by month.
Correct. They could figure it out but your actual utilization is not shown.