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Thanks for the info, BBS. It looks like an alternative way to compute this would be to do the whole thing in months, then divide by 12.
myFICO would make this a whole lot easier if they'd just give us our AAoAs. That way, we'd only have to do the math if we wanted to know the implications of adding or dropping something.
@HeavenOhio wrote:Thanks for the info, BBS. It looks like an alternative way to compute this would be to do the whole thing in months, then divide by 12.
myFICO would make this a whole lot easier if they'd just give us our AAoAs. That way, we'd only have to do the math if we wanted to know the implications of adding or dropping something.
How interesting. It's been a long time since I was a subscriber to one of the myFICO products. But I figured that they supplied their customers with the basic factors on their reports: total utilization, AAoA, Age of Oldest Account, etc.
myFICO doesn't give you a summary page that tells you what your AAoA is? Most other credit monitoring services do that.
If you have not signed up with credit.com, you can get your AAoA there. It's free and based on Experian data. Karma gives you your AAoA but their summary page uses a bad calculator (one that ignores closed accounts) so definitely don't rely on what Karma says about age.
I just found it, but it's buried.
Log in, and hit Scores in the menu. In the FICO 8 Score Ingredients box, hit "Length of Credit History." At that point, you'll be able to see your average account age in months for each report.
In the Report section, you don't get the account age, but you do get the date the accunt was opened. You can figure out the age of each individual account from that.
The calcualtions I did last night were two months off, but I know where those two months came from. One month was because the report is almost a month old. The other came from giving myself credit for a month that FICO hasn't counted yet. When my report updates later this week, I'll re-calculate so my method matches the numbers that myFICO provides. That'll allow me to have more accurate numbers if I want to know how my AAoA might change if something is added or dropped.
I have both Credit Karma and Credit.com. I did the calculations a few weeks ago and was able to match Karma's. I haven't tried it with Credit.com data.
I am very surprised to hear that your calculations matched Karma's. Karma's AAoA calculator ignores closed accounts, which is not how FICO works (or even Vantage). The only way your AAoA should be the same as Karma's is if (by chance) your closed accounts just happen to have the same average age as your open accounts.
I matched Karma's calculation by trial and error. It took a couple of different calculations to work. Since FICO is the more important score, I probably won't fiddle with account ages on Karma anymore.
It's probably good for people to figure that trial and error is likely to be part of the process when doing this for the first time. Whether it's VantageScore or FICO account ages, it's easy to be off by a month or so the first time you try to do it. Trying to match a fresh report will likely simplify things too.
Knowing ahead of time that FICO counts closed accounts and VantageScore doesn't will circumvent a bit of confusion too.
@HeavenOhio wrote:
Knowing ahead of time that FICO counts closed accounts and VantageScore doesn't will circumvent a bit of confusion too.
Actually Vantage 3.0 also counts closed accounts. It's just that the "summary" software on Karma's front end is extremely old -- so old that it does not even accurately reflect what its own scoring algorithm does. Credit.com also uses Vantage but it correctly counts closed accounts in its summary page. Because my three bureaus are identical for age-related factors, I sign on to Credit.com if I want to know what my AAoA is.