What's hurting your FICO score?

[smallfry]

I'm a he.

[Junejer]

Sorry smallfry. Ballerina avi led me to mistakenly believe...nevermind, sorry man. I see you changed the avi. WTG. LOL.

ETA: ly to mistaken

Message Edited by ByrdMan on 05-27-2008 05:12 PM

[Anonymous]

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MidnightVoice wrote:

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RobertEG wrote:

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Did you know that each time one edits a post after the first time one can delete the old "edited by" bits so it looks like just one edit?

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Wow.  I learn something here every day.  If only late pays and baddies could be eliminated so easily.

[smallfry]

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@Junejer wrote:
Sorry smallfry. Ballerina avi led me to mistaken believe...nevermind, sorry man. I see you changed the avi. WTG. LOL.

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LOL.

[haulingthescoreup]

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@smallfry wrote:

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@Junejer wrote:

Sorry smallfry. Ballerina avi led me to mistaken believe...nevermind, sorry man. I see you changed the avi. WTG. LOL.

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LOL.

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Goodness, smallfry, I miss the old avi. It was about as confusing as MV's former avi (the English rose.) The new one is about as far as you can get from the tiny ballerina! I thought you were one of our avant-garde members or something.

I think I'll switch to Timothy's old avi of the grumpy lobsterman, or whatever the heck it was.

[smallfry]

I know you need to take some of the reasons with a grain of salt that FICO generates for your scores but this is a little info I have gleaned from my experiences over the course of the past year.

I received the red flag on all reports when new accounts went from 4 to 5.

16% utilization was considered heavy usage while 9% was considered excellent.

[Anonymous]

Smallfry,

That is valuable information - but I have come to find that those positives and negatives are very much bucket dependent.

For example, I am in one of the newer credit buckets - either 2-5 years or one for multiple new accounts. Either way, for me 13% utility was reported as my #2 positive factor on one report. In addition, I was flagged on 2 of 3 reports for 3 new accounts opened in a 1 year period.

In your case, 13% utility would be considered bad, but when compared to people with young credit (usually young consumers in college or just out), I was holding relatively low balances for that population. The next month when I lowered it to 6% it obviously gave me more points but it moved no higher on the list of positives (my clean payment history has always been #1).

[smallfry]

Despite what some may say about installments not mattering to your score I can tell you that my TU remained at 717 for 4 months from January to April. Once I paid the loan down to 10% of the original balance from 50% April to May my score went up 14 points and it no longer showed as a negative on the Fico summary page. TU Quarterly also listed this as the reason my score went up from 717 to 731. Now I have just 2 public records and short credit history as my only negatives. Average age is just 3 years while oldest account just under 11 years.

[Anonymous]

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smallfry wrote:
Despite what some may say about installments not mattering to your score I can tell you that my TU remained at 717 for 4 months from January to April. Once I paid the loan down to 10% of the original balance from 50% April to May my score went up 14 points and it no longer showed as a negative on the Fico summary page. TU Quarterly also listed this as the reason my score went up from 717 to 731. Now I have just 2 public records and short credit history as my only negatives. Average age is just 3 years while oldest account just under 11 years.

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FICO does seem funny about that. Your score barely moves from lowering installment debt until you get pretty low it seems but then you will take a score hit the second you don't have an installment loan. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, except for the final year of a loan.

[Mythic850]

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FICO does seem funny about that. Your score barely moves from lowering installment debt until you get pretty low it seems but then you will take a score hit the second you don't have an installment loan. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, except for the final year of a loan.

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As further proof that installment balances do matter, look at what's on two of my latest FICO reports contain these snippets among the negative factors:

TU

The balances on your non-mortgage credit accounts are too high.

Total amount you owe on all non-mortgage accounts:$28890
Most FICO High Achievers [?] carry a total balance of less than $1200 on non-mortgage accounts.

EX

The remaining balance on your non-mortgage installment loans is too high.

In my case, $26,000-ish is an auto loan. The remainder is CC balance that has been paid off (should be reported in the next 10 days). The installment loan currently has debt-to-credit ration of 92% (it's only nine months old). The CC util currently reporting is 20%.

Clearly, in both cases the balance amount does include the installment loan balance. It will be interesting to see how the analysis changes when the CC balances are removed.

On another note, it seems very odd that the high achievers have non-mortgage balances less than $1,200. You would think that some of these installment loans (like a 36/48/60 month auto) that's being paid on-time for long periods of time would be a major positive showing that you can responsibly manage your credit payments. Apparently, FICO seems it another way.

Or,like the OP, is this stuff about non-mortgage installment loans just FICO grasping at straws to list some negative factor when their isn't anything else to list. (In my case, it's the third item. Number 1 is serious delinquency (4 of them). Number 2 is multiple accounts showing missed payments (4 of them).