Understanding FICO® Scoring

[Joe77]

Just got a new $750 HSBC card.  Scores are upper 500s.  My biggest negatives are a BK and high utils, the high util will be paid down over the next couple months.

Main questions are:

-Conventional wisdom here says a credit card isn't really "counted" for six months.  With less than 6 months reporting, does it have no effect?  As far as utilization %, pay history, etc?

-I have 5 deferred student loans.  Is that good, bad, or indifferent?  They're from 2 to 12 months old.

[Joe77]

23 views and nobody knows?

[fused]

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Joe77 wrote:

Just got a new $750 HSBC card.  Scores are upper 500s.  My biggest negatives are a BK and high utils, the high util will be paid down over the next couple months.

Main questions are:

-Conventional wisdom here says a credit card isn't really "counted" for six months.  With less than 6 months reporting, does it have no effect?  As far as utilization %, pay history, etc?

-I have 5 deferred student loans.  Is that good, bad, or indifferent?  They're from 2 to 12 months old.

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1.) usually a new CC will lower scores for the first 6-12 month after they are opened and much of this has to do with the lack of payment history, lack of revolving experience (to a lesser degree if you have other cards) and average-age of your CCs. Util, however, has an immediate impact on your scores and this can be good or bad...you know high util bad, low util very good. If your util is good to begin with, the new CC and its CL will only help.

2.) I have never heard of deferred student loans adversely effecting FICO scores.