Whats a good average age of account? And do they use old closed accounts in the calculation? Thanks!
Open or closed, if its on your credit report it has an age, and it gets included in the average age calculation.
I think 8+ years is good. Personally, whenever I pass 1.5 years I tend to apply for more cards. So my AAoA is always bad.
If you are trying to improve your FICO 08 and 08 Bankcard scores, and all you have is credit cards, then I suggest the Alliant Credit Union share secured loan trick. Much faster that waiting for AAoA to improve.
THANKS!!
Was just asking. My AAOA is over 5 years. My oldest account is 16 years old but closed.
I have a mixture, CC's auto loans, mortgage, and student loans....but mostly CC's.
Was just asking. My AAOA is over 5 years. My oldest account is 16 years old but closed.
I have a mixture, CC's auto loans, mortgage, and student loans....but mostly CC's.
I think 5 yrs+ is a good AAOA! 
My oldest line is 3 yrs, and AAoA is just about a year, so I am suitably impressed by 5 years
@Anonymous wrote:What is the Alliant Credit Union share secured loan trick?
This only works if you don't already have open installment loans (car loan, morgage, installment loan, student loan, etc).
1) Join Alliant Credit Union, open a savings account with at least $550 ($1000 would be great)
2) Once you are in, open a $500 share secured loan, 5 years.
3) You don't want to pay any insurance for the loan (they will ask) and you want the normal monthly payments (otherwise the interest rate is higher).
4) Once you have the loan, YOU cancel the automatic monthly payments online.
5) Pay the loan down so only 9% or less is left.
Alliant will push the next payment due date way out because you have already prepaid. You are only paying interest on a tiny sum, and interest rate was low anyways due to it being secured by your money in the savings account. No HP was pulled. You get the benefit of having an almost paid off installment loan on your credit reports for the next few years.
You do need to use the savings account ocasionally so as not to incur a fee for an idle account, but that is easy to avoid. After a month or so, they will offer you money to open a high interest checking account, go ahead, its free money. They may even offer a credit card, though if you accept that they will HP your credit, but that also has a sign up bonus as well.
When you pay down the loan, the funds are released immediately for your use. So once this is setup you don't have much money tied up. Though they are currently paying .995% on savings and .648% on high interest checking, so its not a bad place to park your cash that you use for paying off other bank's credit cards. They refund ATM fees, I think up to $20 a month, etc.
Gory details in this thread mainly towards the end. Early on is all the details of figuring this out over the past year. http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Installment-tradeline-utilization-thread/m-p/4055989#M94476