New account not impacting score

[Anonymous]

I had a new CC appear in my EF report last week and I can see it is still there. ScoreWatch alerted me to changes before and after that, but it seems to be pretending like this new account opening (and its impact on the score) never happened. The account showed up on my report right after approval and the card is not even active yet, but I didn't think FICO knew or cared about whether the card was active. Does SW or FICO exclude new accounts for some time from the score calculation? If so, what is this time? If not, what is going on?

[haulingthescoreup]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I had a new CC appear in my EF report last week and I can see it is still there. ScoreWatch alerted me to changes before and after that, but it seems to be pretending like this new account opening (and its impact on the score) never happened. The account showed up on my report right after approval and the card is not even active yet, but I didn't think FICO knew or cared about whether the card was active. Does SW or FICO exclude new accounts for some time from the score calculation? If so, what is this time? If not, what is going on?

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Whether the card has been activated or not doesn't affect its presence on your reports or whether you get an alert.

There isn't a delay in scoring for a new account appearing. If it's going to affect your score, it will happen as soon as it reports.

I'm confused about the "pretending like this new account opening... never happened." Do you mean that there was no score change? Or that you got goofy and irrelevant reasons on the SW alert that came after the new account appeared? If the second, that's not surprising, I'm afraid. I sometimes think that the reasons that come with alerts, all of which seem to begin with "Your score might have changed for the following reason...", are randomly generated, possibly by chimpanzees with dartboards.

I still get SW alerts for a couple of points up or down with an explanation that they might have changed due to a late payment, and I haven't had one of those in nearly 4 years. I wish they'd leave the fool things off if they're going to be so meaningless. They either confuse people or cause heart attacks, or possibly both.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response, Hauling. By "pretending", I mean that it did not issue an alert for the new account even though it issued alerts for events that happened a couple days before it and a couple days after it. It also seems to have not impacted my score, but I can't be sure of that as my score changed because of unrelated reasons since then.

I then disputed the account marking the option "verify all account information" on EF's site just to see if SW would notice it. SW did at that point alert me to the account "Comments" being changed. But it never gave me the "new account" alert in the first place.

I am less interested in the alert itself. What I would like to know is if SW's score alert really is the current score, i.e., can I be sure that the score is computed based on that day's freshly pulled report factoring in all information even if I wasn't alerted to some of it?

[Anonymous]

And yes, I am totally with you on the reasons being generated by chimps with darts.

[Barry]

Hi avenka,

We show that you canceled your SW subscription on 1/7/11 and haven't pulled an EQ report from myFICO since 11/2/10.  Do you have SW through EQ?  When was this new account posted to your EQ report? Am I missing something?

-Barry

[Anonymous]

Yes, I have SW with EF now. The new account was posted to my EF report but not noticed by EF's SW.

[Barry]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Yes, I have SW with EF now. The new account was posted to my EF report but not noticed by EF's SW.

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Unfortunately, myFICO doesn't have access to any info regarding Score Watch subscriptions purchased from Equifax.com.  Have you given them a call, avenka?

[Anonymous]

Barry, yes, I pointed them to the problem and asked them to refresh the report so I could preserve my only remaining one and they did. I had had similar issues with myFICO's SW product and was hoping EF's version won't have such bugs, but no such avail.

One plus with EF's SW is that you can easily access your current credit report by clicking the option to dispute information. I don't remember being able to do so from myFICO's version. Just FYI. Thanks for your help.

[BungalowMo]

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@Anonymous wrote:

 I then disputed the account marking the option "verify all account information" on EF's site just to see if SW would notice it. SW did at that point alert me to the account "Comments" being changed. But it never gave me the "new account" alert in the first place.

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Why would you dispute an account that you know to be yours?  

 When something isn't quite right on your reports, the answer isn't to automatically dispute it.  That causes more harm than good in most cases.

edit to fix typo...