It did, and then you paid if off; then it stopped helping you.
The game many of us play is to open an SSL for say, 36 to 60 months and then pay 91.1% of the balance shortly after the loan was originated. For SSLs, this results in the next payment being pushed waaaay out into the future, this in turn gives you a nice credit bump for the duration.
@frankjaeger wrote:
@Horseshoez wrote:It did, and then you paid if off; then it stopped helping you.
The game many of us play is to open an SSL for say, 36 to 60 months and then pay 91.1% of the balance shortly after the loan was originated. For SSLs, this results in the next payment being pushed waaaay out into the future, this in turn gives you a nice credit bump for the duration.
Considering that, looking through all my credit notifications on MyFICO, I never once got any points increase from this loan, I would say it didn't help at all.
Hmmm, I just opened up an SSL with PenFed last month and it just popped up on all of my reports, I am definitely seeing a small bump even though I have opted to initially pay it down 16.6% at a time. Said another way, I took out a $3,000 secured loan in early April and then a week later paid $500 against the loan yielding a $2,501 balance; this was enough for between 4 and 9 points for many of my scores. Over the next four months I'm planning on tossing another $500 per month at it and then see what happens to my scores; once I get the balance down to about $500, I'm going to start making token payments with the goal of having it under 9% early next year when my wife and I are planning on looking for a new home. Should be an interesting experiment.
Side comment, as I was typing the above comment, I remembered someone, somewhere here on this site saying something like, "The secured share loan trick works best on a clean score card." If I'm remembering correctly, then those of us with "dirty" cards may not benefit terribly much from playing the SSL game.