topic Re: You have not established a long revolving history in Understanding FICO® Scoring

You have not established a long revolving history

dynamicvb — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 20:14:45 GMT

So I went without credit for quite a while after I had file BK. My reports are now almost clean and I saw this reason as hurting my credit score. Right now my oldest open revolver is at 9 mos. I have history with closed accounts going back 13 years and my average age is between 7-8 depending on the CRA. AoYA is 4 months. Reading the description myFico said that most higher achievers have an open revolver of an average of 25 years.

Does anyone know the threshold for how your old revolvers have to be before this one goes away?

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

SouthJamaica — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 20:16:53 GMT

@dynamicvb wrote:
So I went without credit for quite a while after I had file BK. My reports are now almost clean and I saw this reason as hurting my credit score. Right now my oldest open revolver is at 9 mos. I have history with closed accounts going back 13 years and my average age is between 7-8 depending on the CRA. AoYA is 4 months. Reading the description myFico said that most higher achievers have an open revolver of an average of 25 years.

Does anyone know the threshold for how your old revolvers have to be before this one goes away?

It will be there for awhile, unless worse things happen to take its place.

So get used to it, and don't worry about it.

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

dynamicvb — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 20:19:06 GMT

Yeh, it's not near as bad as the you have a serious delinquency or public record one. :-)

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

dragontears — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 20:24:32 GMT

My oldest open revolving account will be 5 years in April, hoping that reason code goes away for me then.

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 22:15:06 GMT

Remember that for a reason code to go away means one of two things:

(1) That reason is still hurting your score, but you have four worse things hurting your score.

(2) You have a perfect profile with respect to that factor and FICO is not penalizing you by even a single point for this.

Regarding #2, we are certain that people get hurt (by at least one point) for not having an old account even when their oldest account is 16.9 years old. Even after it turns 17 I would guess that a tiny penalty is assessed up through 25 years.

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

Trudy — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 23:08:08 GMT

My AoOA is 22y11m and for Experian only I have this reason code. So 22+ years is not enough to make it go away for Experian

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

dragontears — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 23:56:00 GMT

My oldest account on my report is also 22+ years but it is a paid off student loan not a revolver. (I went almost 10 years without a credit card of any type)
The other negative reason code I see most often of "loan balance too high" will be my friend for many many years to come because I am not in a hurry to pay off a mortgage with a 3.75 interest rate.

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 10:46:57 GMT

A lot of these sort of negative reason codes are often fluff fillers, IMO. Many times they're only impacting scores a point or two. I see negative reason statements depending on the scoring model saying "length of time accounts/revolving accounts have been established," but all of my scores are good (817-899 depending on scoring model, all 850 FICO 8's). I personally wouldn't sweat them much and just let time do its thing.

Re: You have not established a long revolving history

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 14:55:40 GMT

BBS has indirectly raised a key concept, which is basically the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

A big reason not to stress out over Age of Oldest Account is that you cannot control it. While it is true that I wish I had opened a credit card while I was 22 and kept it open, and if I had I would now have an AoOA > 30 years, there is no magic time machine to enable me to make that happen.

What I can do is make choices now to protect my AoOA for the future. The obvious one is to protect my two oldest credit cards from being closed. (My oldest open account is a student loan, so there too I explored whether I could pay it down to $50 and keep it open for a long time.)

Another example where the Serentity Prayer would be helpful is in the incredibly common family of questions here on the Forums that takes the form:

I did X to my reports in the last week....

What will happen to my score?

(X could be going on a Credit Card Spree, Paying off a loan, Paying down CC debt, Becoming 30 days late on an account, etc.)

The person cannot change the choice in the past, so the best answer is: Wait and see. Scores are typically available for a buck, so far better than us speculating is to pull the scores when the reports change and then you'll find out.

In contrast, this question is a very good one:

I am considering doing X to my reports two weeks from now....

What will happen to my score?

It's good because it involves the person soliciting information to assist him in making a future choice.