topic Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points in Understanding FICO® Scoring

Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Lippy4246 — Mon, 14 May 2018 21:16:23 GMT

So I get an email alert from Experian that my Fico 8 went up and very excited to see how my hard work paid off. And I log in and my score went from 733 to 736. I'm also annoyed because my TU (Fico from Discover & Barclays) has been stagnant at 733 since October and my EQ (Citi) dropped one point to 746.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong or what else I can do so I'll provide some background information.

I have a chapter 7 BK that falls off 9/19
I have no delinquent accounts all accounts are paid on time and are reflected on my credit reports.

I have 5 active revolving charge cards and 2 active store cards with a total credit line of 43,500 and I'm using 1% of this with 4% being used of my Discovers $13,500 credit limit. All other cards are reporting zero.

I have an auto loan through cap one for $13,100 with $8,064 remaining plus two closed auto loans paid in full in excellent standing. One of those loans was reaffirmed.

My AoOA is 21 years 10 months
My AAoA is 6 plus years
My youngest account is 10 months as I opened two accounts in May last year and one in July

Then of course I have 3 inquires that turned 1 year this month on EX, one on EQ and one on TU in July.

But that's it. I seem to be going nowhere. Is this a case that I have maxed out my dirty bucket? Any feedback is greatly appreciated

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Mon, 14 May 2018 21:43:40 GMT

@Lippy4246 wrote:

I have 5 active revolving charge cards and 2 active store cards with a total credit line of 43,500 and I'm using 1% of this with 4% being used of my Discovers $13,500 credit limit. All other cards are reporting zero.

Looks like you are asking for feedback on two things:

(1) Why didn't AZEO get me a bigger score boost?

(2) Is there anything I can do to improve my score further?

Regarding #1 we can't say much at this point because we don't have a "before" and "after" description of your cards (before and after AZEO). It looks like the description you gave above is "after." If you went from a total U of 8% to 1% it might be very much expected for AZEO to give you at most 3 points, possibly none. If you want from 55% to 1% it would be really odd.

Regarding #2 your guess about the BK and the dirty profile is likely to be right. 736-746 is very good for someone with a Bankruptcy. You might very well get some more scoring points (on FICO 8) when your single open loan gets paid down to < 8.9% of the original loan amount. When all inquiries and all accounts are > 1 year old then you may get some more points, though again not many.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Mon, 14 May 2018 21:56:27 GMT

Lippy4246 I understand your frustration. On my end I forgot to leave a few dollars outstanding and lost 16 points off my FICO scores. There will be a few dollar back in a couple of days but gads!

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Lippy4246 — Mon, 14 May 2018 22:16:59 GMT

CGID...Pre AZEO I had an aggregate utilization of less than 8.9%, but on multiple cards. Sometimes on a maximum of three cards. I did have over 9% utilization on one card at one point as I was paying down debt on a balance transfer.

I'm also wondering if I'll see movement once my Citi card turns a year old in July

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Mon, 14 May 2018 22:24:10 GMT

How many cards were you showing a balance on just prior to AZEO?

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Lippy4246 — Mon, 14 May 2018 22:28:45 GMT

When I was paying off debt three. The last three months two cards as I was using a rewards gas card then paying it off in full. Now just one

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Mon, 14 May 2018 22:52:05 GMT

You went from 2 cards out of 7 showing a balance to 1. Counting the loan, you went from 3 accounts out of 8 showing a balance to 2.

I am surprised you got any extra points at all. Certainly you should not have been expecting a significant rise.

Even if you had gone from 5 cards to 1 I would not have expected more than a few.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Lippy4246 — Mon, 14 May 2018 23:05:23 GMT

I guess my dream of hitting 800 will have to wait. I have no plans of opening new credit until the BK falls off my report anyway. I want to try my luck with AMEX and have as much firepower as possible when the time comes. My main issue going forward will be my oldest account is scheduled to fall off my report come August changing my AoOA from 21 years to 10 and God only knows what that will do to my AAoA. All I can do is keep paying my bills on time.

Thanks

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

HeavenOhio — Tue, 15 May 2018 00:12:19 GMT

FICO tells us to aim for less than half of our cards reporting balances. Many people will top out that factor by doing that. Some will do better by reporting fewer balances. Two of my scores top out with with less than half. One score is at its highest when I whittle the number of cards with positive balances down to one.

Along with that, getting below 8.9% overall utilization is generally the best one can get. A few of us have reported a gain by getting below 5% or so, but we don't see that happen very often.

You were already doing very well, which is why AZEO didn't add much to your score. It's still a worthwhile test, though, as you now know the best scores you can get with your current profile.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2018 00:16:12 GMT

I agree with CGIDs last post. If your aggregate utilization before/after was below 8.9%, simply going from AZE2 or AZE3 to AZEO usually won't result in a score gain and if it does it would only be a few points.

Hitting 800 is impossible with the presence of a BK; top score would likely be around a 760 if all other factors were perfect and your BK was about to fall off. When your inquiries become unscoreable and your AoYA hits 1 year in a couple of months, I'd ballpark your scores to rise to 745-750 if you have AZEO in place. At that point IMO you'll be within 10-15 points of what your top possible score could be with that BK still lingering.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2018 00:18:13 GMT

@Lippy4246 wrote:
I guess my dream of hitting 800 will have to wait. I have no plans of opening new credit until the BK falls off my report anyway. I want to try my luck with AMEX and have as much firepower as possible when the time comes. My main issue going forward will be my oldest account is scheduled to fall off my report come August changing my AoOA from 21 years to 10 and God only knows what that will do to my AAoA. All I can do is keep paying my bills on time.

Thanks

There two different scoring factors that will get affected when this happens. One as you mention is AAoA or Average Age of Accounts. The other is "Age of Oldest Account" or AoOA. It's hard to guess what the scoring impact will be. A big drop in AoOA can hurt clean profiles most since AoOA is used (along with two other factors) for scorecard assignment. Your BK has you stuck in a scorecard for severe derogs so perhaps the AoOA drop won't have much affect.

Although God does indeed know what losing the old account will do to your AAoA, this is knowledge not confined to Providence alone. You can figure out the impact too. Just compute your AAoA based on including the old account and then again with the account removed.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Lippy4246 — Tue, 15 May 2018 01:13:04 GMT

I'd be happy with 740+ pre my BK falling off next year. I think what bothers me the most is that TU is totally stagnant since September. I'll have to sit down and figure out what my new AAoA & AoOA will be when my last college loan falls to the wayside

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2018 04:53:47 GMT

I NEVER use AZEO at all, but my score keep climbing. I just make sure my util on most of my cards not over 28% but 2 cards are 35-40% and other 2 cards are about 41%-60% because the balance transfer. Only 2 cards have $0 balance: CreditOne and VS. So go figure.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2018 13:07:14 GMT

@AnonymousI NEVER use AZEO at all, but my score keep climbing. I just make sure my util on most of my cards not over 28% but 2 cards are 35-40% and other 2 cards are about 41%-60% because the balance transfer. Only 2 cards have $0 balance: CreditOne and VS. So go figure.

If you have multiple cards with balances that fall into the utilization ranges you mentioned above, you are definitely leaving quite a few points on the table with respect to the utilization sector of the FICO pie. If you were to take yourself to AZEO with the AZEO card having only a small balance, it's possible your scores could be 30-40 points higher give or take. Good to hear that your scores are climbing regardless. No doubt those increases are coming due to other factors outside of utilization if your utilization has been pretty consistent; likely your age of accounts factors growing is what is helping.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2018 13:08:38 GMT

@Lippy4246I'd be happy with 740+ pre my BK falling off next year. I think what bothers me the most is that TU is totally stagnant since September. I'll have to sit down and figure out what my new AAoA & AoOA will be when my last college loan falls to the wayside

What have your other 2 scores done during the same time period that your TU score has remained the same? Are your age of accounts factors the same across all 3 bureaus?

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2018 13:39:53 GMT

The BK scorecard/bucket is what hurts your AZEO benefits the most, unfortunately. I saw this while my tax lien was reporting only to TU -- AZEO just didn't move it around much (but it did matter still).

A few things to note in my quest to understand AZEO:

Don't use a store card for your AZEO card. Examples: a comenity store card or the Amazon store card (not Chase version)
AZEO seems to actually have some point benefit below just the 8.9% threshold -- some people see a few more points going from 5% to a $3 balance on one card. Others see maximum benefits somewhere else (but under 8.9%).
I saw a really weird issue a few months ago with CCT where my balance went to $3 but my score didn't move. No idea why that was, but the next day the score did in fact go up. I wonder if sometimes these credit monitoring sites are displaying the most recent credit report but showing a FICO score calculated from a report a few hours older? No idea.

When my tax lien disappeared from Transunion, my credit utilization penalty was a lot more severe for sure. I can test this easily with my Chase FU card because I can let it report a very high utilization and then PIF so it re-reports to $0.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2018 15:07:54 GMT

@AnonymousAZEO seems to actually have some point benefit below just the 8.9% threshold -- some people see a few more points going from 5% to a $3 balance on one card. Others see maximum benefits somewhere else (but under 8.9%).

ABCD, do you know if we have any "clean" data points on this? I think that for such a thing to be tested and verified, someone would have to move back and forth across the proposed threshold multiple times.

For example, someone has a score of 730 when at AZEO with 7% utilization. They drop to 3% utilization and see their score tick up to 734. Unless this person brings their utilization back up to 7%, then back to 3% and sees a -4 / +4 yo-yo several times from doing so, I'd be very skeptical regarding a proposed data point on this. Perhaps the initial drop from 7% utilization to 3% utilization came at the exact same time AAoA hit 6.5 years and the 4 points gained came from the AAoA change, not the utilization change. I'm sure you get what I mean by this. I'm just wondering if there are any threads out there where someone did in fact go back an forth across an identified threshold at < 8.9% multiple times to clearly identify it as being a threshold [relative to their profile] after all.

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Lippy4246 — Mon, 21 May 2018 02:54:59 GMT

Well I got my newest FICO 8 report from Discover and still no change since September sitting at 733. I'm home I don't think anything will change until my AoYA turns 12 months in August. Back to the garden I go

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Anonymous — Mon, 21 May 2018 03:55:03 GMT

You should see a score gain on 8/1/18 then... just a bit over 2 months, so not that bad

Re: Frustrated....Did AZEO & All I Got Was 3 Lousy Points

Lippy4246 — Mon, 21 May 2018 04:29:07 GMT

There are other moving parts that may also come into play. My oldest account may drop off in August leaving my AoOA at 9.5 years instead of 22 years and my AAoA will change from 7.5 years to just 5.25 years. All my old accounts either went away in the bankruptcy or are loans that aged away gracefully. I plan on gardening until the BK falls off in 2019 and then a new car and the elusive Amex