topic Re: Low CLI Purgatory in General Credit Topics

Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 16:22:41 GMT

Hello !

I'm new to My Fico and thought I would come here for help as I appear to keep spinning my wheels in mud. The problem is that I can't seem to get out of this low score purgatory. All 3 of my scores tend to hover around 590 to 600 but never go much higher. Right now I only have 5 accounts - Walmart, Cap 1 QS, Fingerhut, Target , Merrick Bank card. My payment history is good with all of them. Haven't had a late payment in 2 years ( WM) and the rest - never late. My utilization could be better but with my payment history I can't understand why that would prevent me from at least being in the mid - 600 range. Other than this , I have a couple of baddies from the past that still haunt, but are about to fall off in the next few months to a year, so I'm just gonna allow them to disappear and not touch them. Student loans are in good standing but in deferment. Please help guys as I am at wits end and feel like giving up. I'm making all my payments and doing everything I should and I'm not moving in the right direction. Thanks in advance.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 17:02:46 GMT

DEROGS:

It sounds like you have some from 2-3 years ago, and also some from 6 years ago. You don't mention what these are or how severe they are, so it is hard to assess how much they could be hurting your score. Certainly they are hurting your score some, and you'd benefit from heading over to the rebuilding forum to discuss strategies with the folks there for getting all of them removed.

CC UTILIZATION:

You mention that this "could be better" -- but without knowing specific numbers it is hard to guess the score impact. Certainly the right move for you is to pay all cards to $0 and then continue to use one card for something small. This should help you substantially. and it needs to be your baseline to help assess the impact of the derogs.

CREDIT MIX

It sounds like you have no open installment loans. If so, you should consider implementing the Share Secure Loan Technique, which is described in the first 2-3 posts of the thread below. It will get you (roughly) another 30 points.

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Adding-an-installment-loan-the-Share-Secure-technique/td-p/4506756

GOALS

It's unclear whether your goal is to have a higher scores (implied by the actual body of what you wrote) or to get a credit limit increase (implied by the subject header).

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

SouthJamaica — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 18:08:58 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Hello !

I'm new to My Fico and thought I would come here for help as I appear to keep spinning my wheels in mud. The problem is that I can't seem to get out of this low score purgatory. All 3 of my scores tend to hover around 590 to 600 but never go much higher. Right now I only have 5 accounts - Walmart, Cap 1 QS, Fingerhut, Target , Merrick Bank card. My payment history is good with all of them. Haven't had a late payment in 2 years ( WM) and the rest - never late. My utilization could be better but with my payment history I can't understand why that would prevent me from at least being in the mid - 600 range. Other than this , I have a couple of baddies from the past that still haunt, but are about to fall off in the next few months to a year, so I'm just gonna allow them to disappear and not touch them. Student loans are in good standing but in deferment. Please help guys as I am at wits end and feel like giving up. I'm making all my payments and doing everything I should and I'm not moving in the right direction. Thanks in advance.

Revolving utilization is a huge factor. Since your utilization 'could be better', work on that.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 11:57:11 GMT

Is this also true if your utilization is very low? I was blown away by the credit limit I got from Navy Fed and so now my utilization across all cards hovers at 1-2%. I get big green text that says I'm doing excellent with it and there's a FB credit group that I just lurk in that keeps saying to keep all cards at some oddly exact number like 4.6% for maximum FICO points. So I'm a bit confused.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

DollyLama — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 12:45:46 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I get big green text that says I'm doing excellent with it and there's a FB credit group that I just lurk in that keeps saying to keep all cards at some oddly exact number like 4.6% for maximum FICO points. So I'm a bit confused.

Don't keep a balance on ALL CCs at all. At statement cut, ALL CCs should report a 0 balance, with only ONE reporting a balance with minimum <8.9% of that one cards total tradeline. If you wish to pay around monthly and have 4.6 utilization on that card you can.

We call it AZEO, all zero except one.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 13:55:53 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Hello !

The problem is that I can't seem to get out of this low score purgatory. All 3 of my scores tend to hover around 590 to 600 but never go much higher.

If your payment history isn't perfect and your utilization is high, 2/3 of your score is being severely hindered. You could easily be leaving 50-100 points on the table for each of these two categories. That's 100-200 points total, meaning if you fixed both categories you'd be in the 700-800 range.

As CGID pointed out, you didn't give any concrete information regarding your late payments (severity, number of them, exact age) or your exact aggregate revolving utilization percentage currently. Those pieces of information would allow us to give you a better idea of what you'd stand to gain point wise by cleaning up each factor.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 14:15:46 GMT

Can I jump in here and ask for advice on my situation or would you like me to open a new topic?

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 14:18:02 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Can I jump in here and ask for advice on my situation or would you like me to open a new topic?

Either way is fine! If it's related to the topic of the OP, here cool. If it's an unrelated topic, you may be best served to start a new thread, as it will gain better exposure and potentially more responses that way.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:29:35 GMT

As of this morning my FICO scores are as follows:

Exp 632 Eq 642 TU 643

Credit util: around 1-2% usually. All cards carry a zero balance for the most part. I shuffle through them every now and then.

Payment history: 8 missed payments in the past 7 years. All from Fedloan and their error which doesn't seem fixable. All other cards are paid in full at the end of the month.

4 Negative Accounts

CapOne charge off - DOFD in late 2011. Long story short: no one can show me anything about this account and it was so long ago I don't remember. I have two other accts with them all good standing that I've offered good will towards but they won't budge. Falling off soon.

Bank credit card that was closed with a balance, I moved and forgot to update my address and missed it. Was bought by MCM and I paid in full PTD. Schedueld to fall off early 2018. original account listed as charge off with no balance.

Working on my AAoA. Right now its kinda low because my student loans were paid off and that brings me to FedLoan Servicing.

Student loan missed payments

While under deferrment, FedLoan Servicing mistakenly reported my loan as in repayment status and 120+ days late for 8 months in 2015. The loans have since been completely paid off and they are unable to updaet payment records on closed accounts. Not sure how to handle this one since CFPB does not handle federal student loans and they are not cooperating at all.

One collections account

This one also falls off 2018. Medical debt that I would gladly do a PFD but the agency wants their pound of flesh. They've tried reaging accounts before so just watching carefully.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 14:45:37 GMT

Two more... my Perkins loan shows up as a collections account, with missed payments on it. This is the one that went into deferrment. I have documentation stating this from the Dept of Ed and people that work there via email. They will not change it back to educational loan even though I paid it in full.

The capOne card shows open status, over credit limit and it hasn't had a payment in 84 months., or some ridiculous high number.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:17:30 GMT

Some thoughts for Achieving (not the OP):

Your first question was about CC utilization. The best approach is to keep your utilization low, but exact numbers are not worth worrying about it in your case. That's because you have far greater issues with all your derogs. Implementing AZEO and having the remaining card reporting a small balance is optimal, but it doesn't help you build your score over time. (You can get the extra scoring points from AZEO any time you want.) Certainly the advice you have received about needing to keep your utilization at 4% is mistaken. For one thing it is wrong and for another it will induce you to spend money to maintain the 4% level.

Important side note: FICO considers all closed cards with positive balances as part of your utilization. It considers the card as having a $0 credit limit but does add the amount you owe into the total utilization calculation. The high level summary software that displays your utilization % often fails to include this. Thus you might think you have a utilization of 3% when the FICO scoring algorithm considers it to be much higher.

You mention your DTI. I'd leave your DTI out of the discussion. You'll help yourself best here by focusing just on your reports and your scores. Neither reports nor scores consider income and therefore do not consider DTI. Nor do FICO scores consider how much a car is worth. FICO scores do consider how much an open loan has been paid down, which is done by comparing the amount you owe on the loan vs the loan's original amount. That's a minor factor for you right now, however, and you should focus on your derogs. If you want the bottom line, however, FICO likes it best when your open loans are mostly but not entirely paid off.

Derogs:

Some of these it sounds like will be dropping offf your reports soon. My advice is to allow time to deal with these and therefore leave them out of the discussion. You need to prune back your discussion to only the most important things. Right now it is so long that most people are going to get lost and won't be willing to wade through all the text to try to help.

My advice is to head over to the rebuilding forum and begin focusing one by one on targeted derog issues to see if people can help you out. Best wishes....

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:21:22 GMT

Thank you!

I competely agree. I know I was rambling, my apologies -- I wanted to be thorough.

I can't seem to make any headway with the derogs so being patient is my best bet.

Thanks again.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

MakingProgress — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:23:15 GMT

This agency has threatened to sell my account to Resurgent to re-age it and further mess up my chances of a FICO score that isn't red or yellow.

Let them sell it. It will not re-age the account. It should drop off your reports based upon the DOFD not the date it is sold or re-sold.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:34:02 GMT

I try my best to believe they will do the right thing and not reage the account some other way -- I've found them changing dates on documents before. 2/10/11 magically becomes 10/2/11 and you have to be so vigilant.

CFPB tells me the agencies have no legal obligation to report accurate data, their only obligation is to address errors in a timely fashion. They can put whatever they want in your file and then it becomes your job to get it out.

And they have tried every sneaky trick in the book so i just get so darn frustrated.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Kree — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:41:33 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

CREDIT MIX
It sounds like you have no open installment loans. If so, you should consider implementing the Share Secure Loan Technique, which is described in the first 2-3 posts of the thread below. It will get you (roughly) another 30 points.

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Adding-an-installment-loan-the-Share-Secure-technique/td-p/4506756

I thought Student Loans counted as open installment loans even while in deferment.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:46:23 GMT

They've been paid off and the accounts are now closed. I wish they were open, I can't fix some of FedLoan's mistakenly reported payment dates. So I now have an Alliant Credit Union SSL.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 19:34:10 GMT

@Kree wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:

CREDIT MIX
It sounds like you have no open installment loans. If so, you should consider implementing the Share Secure Loan Technique, which is described in the first 2-3 posts of the thread below. It will get you (roughly) another 30 points.

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Adding-an-installment-loan-the-Share-Secure-technique/td-p/4506756

I thought Student Loans counted as open installment loans even while in deferment.

@Anonymous Kree. Good catch. I told the OP that it sounded like he had no open loans because he wrote:

"Right now I only have 5 accounts - Walmart, Cap 1 QS, Fingerhut, Target , Merrick Bank card"

In fact he had more than those five accounts, since he later mentioned having open student loans, which I missed.

Our OP will not be helped by the SSL technique, but it sounds like the guy who has been getting advice from us later in the thread would be.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 20:03:53 GMT

I've muddied the waters, I'm sorry... I'll go create my own thread. thanks

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 20:31:16 GMT

Well, like BBS said earlier, you are welcome to be here. Our OP may not be returning. Shouldn't be that hard to distinguish you guys if he does come back.

On the other hand, creating a thread in the Rebuilding forum might be smart too. You might even decide to pick one specific derog and let that be the subject of that thread. Then, when you have gotten as much good advice as you can, create a thread for another derog.

Re: Low CLI Purgatory

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 15:50:40 GMT

Hey Credit Guy ! First let me say sorry for the delayed response. I didn't realize that I would have so many replies so quickly. Moreover, let me tell you thank you for taking the time to help, advise and enlighten me with credit techniques to help improve my situation. Can't tell you enough how appreciative I am.

Also, forgive me for the error in my title /topic heading. I meant to write credit score purgatory. I guess due to my recent cli denial I had that on my mind. Hope this clears that up for evryone. In terms of your questions about my credit specifics....here is where I currently stand :

Fingerhut Advantage - $1200 Open 1yr

Target RedCard - $1900 Open 1yr

WalMart CC - $150 Open 2 yrs.

Merrick Bank Mc - $600 2yrs.

Cap 1 QS - $750 11mths

Utilization Rate - FH 5%, Target 65%, WM 10%, Merrick 80%, Cap1 40%

Late Payments - 1 late payment ( 30 day ) 2 years ago - WalMart. Perfect with all other accounts.