I FINALLY have six months of credit so now I have scores!

[Anonymous]

I had been off the credit grid for years before I used the Shopping Cart Trick (learned here, THANKS!) in January and got a comenity store card. I’ve been painfully waiting and relying on Vantage 3.0 scores, and whatever score Equifax provides to try and get an idea of what my True FICO Scores would look like on July 1st since I had no baddies.

Transunion Fico 8 - 701 AoOA-6mnths AAoA -4 mnths

Equifax Fico 8 - 707 AoOA-6mnths AAoA -4 mnths

Experian Fico 8 - 734 AoOA- 12yrs 11mnths AAoA - 2 yrs 1mnth

FYI- I already had closed clean trade lines on experian so that’s why it was higher. Up until today Fico couldn’t give me a score for TU and EQ.

[Anonymous]

CONGRATS!!!

Great "starting" scores!

I bet you're thinking about getting a new card.   The first thing I did after getting my FICO score was apply for Amex.

[Anonymous]

Which Amex do you think I should app for based on those scores? It must be too early to appear on a prequalication list because cap one , Discover, and Amex don’t have offers for me.

[19eighty5]

Congratulations!

[arkane]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Which Amex do you think I should app for based on those scores? It must be too early to appear on a prequalication list because cap one , Discover, and Amex don’t have offers for me.

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Apply for the ones that you actually find useful and think you'll keep around for the long term. If you're considering lenders outside of Amex, avoid Chase and Barclays for now since they typically like to see at least a year of history before granting approvals (Chase is notoriously strict about this). 

[Anonymous]

I’m so new to this I don’t even know what Barclays is!

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous
FYI- I already had closed clean trade lines on experian so that’s why it was higher. Up until today Fico couldn’t give me a score for TU and EQ.

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Off topic here, but is there any chance you could contact the lender here and possibly get them to report the account info to both TU and EQ?  Doing so would raise your AoOA ~12 years, resulting in instant ~25-30 point gains on TU and EQ. 

[Anonymous]

Wouldn’t that be great? I had a mortgage on a house in 2003 and that mortgage was sold 3 times before I sold the house in 2009. Each different mortgage company has fallen off except for one. For some reason, they sent a “Pays as Agreed” update to experian in 2013 when I definitely didn’t have an account with them. I assume that means it’ll stay listed until 2023.

[Anonymous]

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@AnonymousWouldn’t that be great? I had a mortgage on a house in 2003 and that mortgage was sold 3 times before I sold the house in 2009. Each different mortgage company has fallen off except for one. For some reason, they sent a “Pays as Agreed” update to experian in 2013 when I definitely didn’t have an account with them. I assume that means it’ll stay listed until 2023.

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It should.  That's 5 years of having a solid AoOA verses a very weak one.  It's a night and day difference in terms of credit history and on your file is the difference between good and excellent credit.  With your AoOA at 12+ years your credit scores are right there where you can just about secure top-notch rates for anything you may need.  With your AoOA at 6 months, you'll likely come up short.

Fixing this could be as easy as a simple phone call or letter to your lender.  Just tell them that the account has been reported to Experian and you can see it on your Experian report, but would really appreciate it if they could also report it to TU/EQ.  I think their chances are better than average that they'd do this for you and you'd probably see the account show up in a week or so along with a 25-30 point score gain on TU/EQ.  Just something worthy of consideration.

[Anonymous]

I’ll give that a try for sure!