@abundancejones wrote:So...FICO08 is punishing those with legit AU accounts?
What kind of "legit" accounts?
It's not punishing mine. But I also have a history on the cards I'm an AU on. For instance, same name and address at one point.
If you're an AU on card that belongs to someone other than your spouse or family member, it may not include them if it can't verify you're a legitimate AU. We've seen it here.
But I wouldn't worry about that, according to a thread that was started last week, this summer, no AU's will be calculated at all.
Here's the thread http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Authorized-User-Accounts/td-p/3129074
Who knows if it will really go through, but I'll be checking my reports next month to see if anythng's changed.
Starting Score: 600s
@abundancejones wrote:So...FICO08 is punishing those with legit AU accounts?
I would say not necessarily, i have an few au accounts and my eq 04 and eq 08 scores are exactly the same.
@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
@Ubuntu wrote:
I have a clean but sparse history. For a long time the only accounts I had listed were both perfectly maintained AU accounts. In July of 2013 I applied for a card in my name and then another in October. I can see from the free EQ report that MyFICO gave me today that my AAoA dropped from 6 years to 9 months. It looks like AU accounts are of no use in FICO 08. Good thing I started when I did or the drop would've been even bigger.
Oh, I don't think all that Understanding Your FICO Score etc stuff is organically generated with the score from the core process. It's more like an independent add-on layer, second-hand guesswork if you ask me. Which brings up the question of how can you really tell whether AU accounts are used in calculating your score?
Easy, run a report, see you total credit line, how much is reporting, and what FICO is showing the utility % to be. Do the math.
OR,
Run a report, look at what FICO has for your AAoA, and then calculate it yourself. I believe the calculation is 1 year =12 months. So if you have 2 cards, and each card is only a year old, the total would be 24 months. Divide that by 2 (for the two cards you have) and you'll get 1 year AAoA.
If your AU accounts aren't being counted, your utility % will be higher (because it's excluding those credit lines), and your AAoA will also be lower, because again, it's excluding those cards.
Just do the math.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
@Ubuntu wrote:
I have a clean but sparse history. For a long time the only accounts I had listed were both perfectly maintained AU accounts. In July of 2013 I applied for a card in my name and then another in October. I can see from the free EQ report that MyFICO gave me today that my AAoA dropped from 6 years to 9 months. It looks like AU accounts are of no use in FICO 08. Good thing I started when I did or the drop would've been even bigger.
Oh, I don't think all that Understanding Your FICO Score etc stuff is organically generated with the score from the core process. It's more like an independent add-on layer, second-hand guesswork if you ask me. Which brings up the question of how can you really tell whether AU accounts are used in calculating your score?
Back of hand napkin math based on anecdotal experiences. In short, it's awfully tough to tell even for sophisticates in playing FICO reindeer games: if I had an AU or two I likely have enough data that I could probably tease it out, but I'm not going to go piggybacking a mix of likely legit (hi Dad!) and piggybacked abuse AU's to try to test it personally. Also if your FICO 8 takes a precipitous drop from your FICO 4 score, and all you have is AU's for revolving tradelines, it's a decent bet they're being discounted.
That said, probably the easiest test to accomplish since most of us if we have any data have this point: let all your personal cards report zero instead of the customary one. If you take a non-trivial drop, they're not likely being counted (on the assumption they have balances). If you don't, they likely are... secondary test in that first one, go back to the 1 balance reporting and see if you gain your points back.
I think that's about the cleanest one as it's awfully hard to predict utilization breakpoints unless it's something really large on the resultant swing: 40K in AU's and 2K of one's own cards or whatever and just drop 70% utilization on them or whatever and see if the score reacts substantially might be another test but that isn't feasible for a lot of files.
@ficonightmare wrote:
@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
@Ubuntu wrote:
I have a clean but sparse history. For a long time the only accounts I had listed were both perfectly maintained AU accounts. In July of 2013 I applied for a card in my name and then another in October. I can see from the free EQ report that MyFICO gave me today that my AAoA dropped from 6 years to 9 months. It looks like AU accounts are of no use in FICO 08. Good thing I started when I did or the drop would've been even bigger.
Oh, I don't think all that Understanding Your FICO Score etc stuff is organically generated with the score from the core process. It's more like an independent add-on layer, second-hand guesswork if you ask me. Which brings up the question of how can you really tell whether AU accounts are used in calculating your score?
Easy, run a report, see you total credit line, how much is reporting, and what FICO is showing the utility % to be. Do the math.
OR,
Run a report, look at what FICO has for your AAoA, and then calculate it yourself. I believe the calculation is 1 year =12 months. So if you have 2 cards, and each card is only a year old, the total would be 24 months. Divide that by 2 (for the two cards you have) and you'll get 1 year AAoA.
If your AU accounts aren't being counted, your utility % will be higher (because it's excluding those credit lines), and your AAoA will also be lower, because again, it's excluding those cards.
Just do the math.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Ah, I don't know that we can trust those as being accurate to be honest. Just because the FICO algorithm discounts it, doesn't mean that the third party parsers will necessarily discount them: that's true of pulling the reports from the bureaus directly as well with their own calculations on some of the reports as we care whether the almighty algorithm ignores it, not the data presentation to us as consumers. I don't think we can use those estimations as a result.
@Revelate wrote:
@ficonightmare wrote:
@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
@Ubuntu wrote:
I have a clean but sparse history. For a long time the only accounts I had listed were both perfectly maintained AU accounts. In July of 2013 I applied for a card in my name and then another in October. I can see from the free EQ report that MyFICO gave me today that my AAoA dropped from 6 years to 9 months. It looks like AU accounts are of no use in FICO 08. Good thing I started when I did or the drop would've been even bigger.
Oh, I don't think all that Understanding Your FICO Score etc stuff is organically generated with the score from the core process. It's more like an independent add-on layer, second-hand guesswork if you ask me. Which brings up the question of how can you really tell whether AU accounts are used in calculating your score?
Easy, run a report, see you total credit line, how much is reporting, and what FICO is showing the utility % to be. Do the math.
OR,
Run a report, look at what FICO has for your AAoA, and then calculate it yourself. I believe the calculation is 1 year =12 months. So if you have 2 cards, and each card is only a year old, the total would be 24 months. Divide that by 2 (for the two cards you have) and you'll get 1 year AAoA.
If your AU accounts aren't being counted, your utility % will be higher (because it's excluding those credit lines), and your AAoA will also be lower, because again, it's excluding those cards.
Just do the math.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Ah, I don't know that we can trust those as being accurate to be honest. Just because the FICO algorithm discounts it, doesn't mean that the third party parsers will necessarily discount them: that's true of pulling the reports from the bureaus directly as well with their own calculations on some of the reports as we care whether the almighty algorithm ignores it, not the data presentation to us as consumers. I don't think we can use those estimations as a result.
I guess that makes sense. I mean instead of doing the math like I indicated in my post above, if that were true, they would probably just not include those cards on your report altogether.
To be honest, I wish that's exactly what they did- just exlude the AU's they don't count from the reports.
@ficonightmare wrote:
@Revelate wrote:
@ficonightmare wrote:
@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
@Ubuntu wrote:
I have a clean but sparse history. For a long time the only accounts I had listed were both perfectly maintained AU accounts. In July of 2013 I applied for a card in my name and then another in October. I can see from the free EQ report that MyFICO gave me today that my AAoA dropped from 6 years to 9 months. It looks like AU accounts are of no use in FICO 08. Good thing I started when I did or the drop would've been even bigger.
Oh, I don't think all that Understanding Your FICO Score etc stuff is organically generated with the score from the core process. It's more like an independent add-on layer, second-hand guesswork if you ask me. Which brings up the question of how can you really tell whether AU accounts are used in calculating your score?
Easy, run a report, see you total credit line, how much is reporting, and what FICO is showing the utility % to be. Do the math.
OR,
Run a report, look at what FICO has for your AAoA, and then calculate it yourself. I believe the calculation is 1 year =12 months. So if you have 2 cards, and each card is only a year old, the total would be 24 months. Divide that by 2 (for the two cards you have) and you'll get 1 year AAoA.
If your AU accounts aren't being counted, your utility % will be higher (because it's excluding those credit lines), and your AAoA will also be lower, because again, it's excluding those cards.
Just do the math.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Ah, I don't know that we can trust those as being accurate to be honest. Just because the FICO algorithm discounts it, doesn't mean that the third party parsers will necessarily discount them: that's true of pulling the reports from the bureaus directly as well with their own calculations on some of the reports as we care whether the almighty algorithm ignores it, not the data presentation to us as consumers. I don't think we can use those estimations as a result.
I guess that makes sense. I mean instead of doing the math like I indicated in my post above, if that were true, they would probably just not include those cards on your report altogether.
To be honest, I wish that's exactly what they did- just exlude the AU's they don't count from the reports.
I completely agree but given how secretive FICO is about the algorithm, I'm nearly confident the bureaus nor even FICO Consumer division has real access to the algorithm itself... and that probably means they're not privy to the anti-abuse portion either. The more people who know the more likely it is to get out, the more likely the abuse will be.
End of the day if you have a legit use for an AU, go get one: it's not going to hurt FICO, it might help. If you don't (like my own case) then skip it.