topic PLOC finally reports in General Credit Topics

PLOC finally reports

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 07:15:58 GMT

Back in November I opened up a PLOC with RBC Bank. I opened it primarily to use it as a safety net for my bill payments and stuff, so that nothing would ever bounce. After a month or two I called them and asked why I didn't see it on my bureaus -- I was hoping for an extra account in those days, to thicken my file. The CSR told me that they don't ever report PLOC's to the bureaus. Weird, but I didn't argue and subsequently forgot about it.

Well today it reported. Maybe they report twice a year? I don't know, but it showed on my report with 6 months of paid up history and bumped my score from 713 to 720 on Experian. Yay!

There seem to be a few effects here that would explain the bump up:

1- It lowered my utilization from 3% to 2%. Not sure that matters, but it added an extra $9k to my overall credit.

2- It pulled my AAoA up from 5 months to 6 months. I suspect this is the explanation--that 6 months is some magic number for AAoA calculations.

Had I known it would eventually report I might have skipped apping one of my other cards, since now I have more accounts than I was aiming for. I guess my FirstTech Visa is probably spurious and I don't really use it.

Anyway! Some data, and I'm happy about the 7 point bump.

Re: PLOC finally reports

Revelate — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 06:21:35 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

Back in November I opened up a PLOC with RBC Bank. I opened it primarily to use it as a safety net for my bill payments and stuff, so that nothing would ever bounce. After a month or two I called them and asked why I didn't see it on my bureaus -- I was hoping for an extra account in those days, to thicken my file. The CSR told me that they don't ever report PLOC's to the bureaus. Weird, but I didn't argue and subsequently forgot about it.

Well today it reported. Maybe they report twice a year? I don't know, but it showed on my report with 6 months of paid up history and bumped my score from 713 to 720 on Experian. Yay!

There seem to be a few effects here that would explain the bump up:

1- It lowered my utilization from 3% to 2%. Not sure that matters, but it added an extra $9k to my overall credit.

2- It pulled my AAoA up from 5 months to 6 months. I suspect this is the explanation--that 6 months is some magic number for AAoA calculations.

Had I known it would eventually report I might have skipped apping one of my other cards, since now I have more accounts than I was aiming for. I guess my FirstTech Visa is probably spurious and I don't really use it.

Anyway! Some data, and I'm happy about the 7 point bump.

AAOA has a minimum floor of 1 year, and since it rounds down, anything short of 2 years = 1 year.

Not certain why it in and of itself would trigger a point increase other than wandering over a number of revolvers with balances line potentially. Could be other things in your report as well.

Anyway I take every FICO score win that I can with open arms, no downside in this case, enjoy!

Re: PLOC finally reports

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 18:15:27 GMT

I have heard before that AAoA rounds to 1 year, but I wonder if actually 6, 12, 24 rounded down. I'll know for sure in 6 months when my AAoA turns 1 year old. My prediction is that I will see my score rise on that day. We'll see!

Next key date is in 2 months when my oldest account hits a year. I am hoping for something there too.

Then I'll start seeing inquiries hitting the 1 year mark and hoping that has an impact too.

We'll see! Kind fo fun to watch it, though, I am going to stop some of the services I have been using to monitor it so closely. For the first 10 months of my credit history I have been very active and monitoring through multiple services, a couple of them paid. Now I'm pretty much going to sit and garden from here on in, and I think it makes sense to cut down to a single credit service. I am probably going to stick to Experian and just watch that until I have grown a nice garden.

Re: PLOC finally reports

CreditDunce — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 22:56:06 GMT

A couple of months ago MarineVietVet posted some really good info on how AAoA is used in FICO. He couldn't give us many details, but he did tell us AAoA rounding isn't as simple as "common" knowledge would have you believe:

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/I-messed-up-big-time-and-need-to-apologize/m-p/3914707