I don't want to kill AAoA of 7 years....

[daisyduke]

EQ has my AAoA as 7 years. When will I be punished for going to say AAoA 6 years instead of 7? Will I see a drop in score from 7 years down to 6?

I did a spreadsheet that lists all my accounts, the date opened by month and year, and played with it to figure out how many new accounts I can add without bringing my AAoA down too much...I also figured out accounts that will drop (only one account will drop), a baddie account but it's from 2000...so i think the calculations are right on track...my formula in calculating AAoA gave me the same results as EQ...

So I am trying to figure out my strategy for adding new accounts but I am not sure where I would be punished? going from 7 years to 6 years? or is it five?  

My credit history is:  15 Years, 2 Months agoFICO High Achievers [?] opened their oldest account 19 years ago, on average. Average age of your accounts
7 years

According to my calculation, IF I add a car in December and a new card in Sept, my AAoA will drop to 6 years....

Any advice in understanding this would be appreciated. Thank you.

[CreditAble]

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@daisyduke wrote:

Will I see a drop in score from 7 years down to 6?

So I am trying to figure out my strategy for adding new accounts but I am not sure where I would be punished? going from 7 years to 6 years? or is it five?  

According to my calculation, IF I add a car in December and a new card in Sept, my AAoA will drop to 6 years....

Any advice in understanding this would be appreciated. Thank you.

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Last September when my AAoA was still under 6 years,

I had reached 800 Fico for the first time.

If a 5 year AAoA scoring bucket was sufficient for an 800 score, I was not so sure my score would go up if my credit history were to be compared to those with a longer average age of 6 years.

I opened a new credit card before the 6 AAoA mark last September and still did not drop below 5 years of AAoA.. My scores only dropped to the 780 range even though I had done a BT on the new card for 50% of the credit limit.

It seems that being compared to others with an average age of 5 years seems to be a pretty good bucket to be in. I am not so sure I want to be compared with people with six years of average age. I can only guess that people with longer AAoA might generally have longer, thicker credit files. Since 5 years AAoA was good enough for an 800 Fico I didn't see any reason for me to particularly want to compete with people who have 6 years AAoA.

I am again aproaching the 6 year average age mark this month or next and I am watching my scores closely to see what the 6 year impact might have. I will be allowing my AAoA to reach 6 years for the first time. If my scores go down by much I am ready to pull the trigger on another credit card app so that I will have another year at 5 years AAoA. That way I can still be a bigger fish in a smaller pond with perhaps a bigger Fico score.  I will be paying off the remaining BT balance in November when the 0% interest rate expires. I will then have some really good data points pertaining to your question. If my utility returns to where it was a year ago and I do not regain my 800 Fico score, then a six year AAoA bucket instead of 5 years might be presumed to be the culprit. Apping for a new tradeline at that time would shed some light on the bucket thing. If my score goes up by much after adding one tradeline and lowering my average age back to 5 years I will know that my own target sweet spot is 5 years for AAoA.

I don't know if I was able to help you with your decision.

 My gut says you may very likely do better scorewise if your credit file was compared to the files of others with one or two fewer years of average age. I would therefore encourage you to app for one tradeline and see what happens. Observe the new scores and decide if you wan to app again in order to join me in the 5 year AAoA "sweet spot".

Please share any future data with us because I would like to determine what AAoA I want to "park" my credit files at in order to stay in the best scoring bucket possible. Remember high achievers' "average" stats are only averages. That doesn't necessarily mean that the average of all high scorers' AAoAs is necessarily the best average age to have.

[daisyduke]

Credit Able,

thanks for your thoughtful answer. I had never imagined that my age of 7 would actually be hurting me. I'm sure i'm in the bad scoring bucket, as I do have three derog accounts - so maybe by bringing it down a bit, it could help me. I only have eleven accounts on my credit file as well...

Hard to say what is going to happen -- but i will report back on this..

my TU Fico just dropped like 16 points for no apparent reason. And I mean, I checked carefully, everything, balances, ages, inquiries...only GOOD stuff happened, like one inquiry fell off and i got one month older....balances were the same, no lates reporting...i don't get the reason...

Thanks again for your input, yes it was helpful.