@butterpecan wrote:
@Brian_Earl_Spilner wrote:It's not a hidden trade line. They choose not to report to all the bureaus, which any lender can do. There may also be certain situations that they wouldn't report, like if it's only 4 pmnts over 2 months. Affirm shows as loans on EX for me.
@Brian_Earl_Spilner Saw this thread....Wondering if the PayPal "pay monthly" loan through WebBank on PayPal's website is also a CFA?
pay monthly probably is, pay in 4 doesn't report AFAIK
@GZG wrote:
@butterpecan wrote:
@Brian_Earl_Spilner wrote:It's not a hidden trade line. They choose not to report to all the bureaus, which any lender can do. There may also be certain situations that they wouldn't report, like if it's only 4 pmnts over 2 months. Affirm shows as loans on EX for me.
@Brian_Earl_Spilner Saw this thread....Wondering if the PayPal "pay monthly" loan through WebBank on PayPal's website is also a CFA?
pay monthly probably is, pay in 4 doesn't report AFAIK
Pretty much this. Have no idea if there are outliers.
on my credit report, it says Account type Unsecured .. I have a few points bump after paid off ..
>
@GZG wrote:
@Tiersha wrote:I've read a little here about the Affirm Financing. Ive read where most get a 10 pt ding for using them because they are a Cfa...that's what I am understanding anyway.
What makes them a cfa? 'because they're coded as such'
the 'FICO' reasoning is that these are 'bad' loans that people without access to traditional financing get because they can't get good credit options. Which is fair. If people with 'CFA's' are riskier customers, I'd understand it from FICO's end.
I've seen people mention installment loans being a cfa i.e. car loans.
which is why CFA penalty is dumb, the logic behind CFA's just isn't true anymore when 0% affirm APR and normal dealer financing can arbitrarily be labeled CFA.
My car loan didn't ding me- just random fyi.
I'm asking because I want to finance a cnc purchase but the company uses Affirm and I was hesitant as I thought they were configured for sub prime users and even those with decent scores got stuck with the sub prime configuration.
Usually this is true, Affirm does offer 30% APR subprime bad financing. They also offer 0% APR stuff too, it's simply not worth them reporting a 0% APR loan and eating a CFA peanlty.
Why are cfa loans dingy when there are so many considered as cfa loans?
It's fine to label bad loans as bad loans and be given a penalty for them, but for Affirm to offer prime 0 APR terms while hiding reporting as a CFA is garbage. If I had dealer financing label a car loan with them as a CFA, I'd be upset. Wonder if I even ask dealer financing if they know if their loan is labeled as a CFA or not if they would even know.
Am I just misunderstanding this whole cfa thing?
No, it's just an unfortunate aspect of FICO
Haha All I went searching for initially was what scoring model Affirm uses and here I am in a squirrel hole lol.
If 30% loans are a "trash loan product" then shouldn't credit cards that charge over 30% be classified by FICO that way?
Synchrony Bank and many others have products that exceed 30%, Capital One has some. You don't get a 10 point FICO penalty for having credit cards from those people with 30%+ interest.
What makes Affirm trashier than that? Maybe they didn't grease the right palms or something, I don't know. 
30% loans are what I'd call a bottom feeder product, at least among the loan products that are even legal to write. If FICO is scoring Affirm and Klarna negatively based on the type of people who have them, why not apply a 10 point penalty to people who get a Capital One Platinum or a Kohl's Card, or a Paypal Cashback Mastercard?
@TrapLine wrote:A Ford Motor Credit Loan? Yikes! Had five loans through Ford since the year 2000 and not one of them coded as a CFA.
Will add, they were all 0.00% Apy to 1.90% Apy. Whether that had any affect, I have no idea? Do know they treated me very well and told me call ahead and they would see what rate(s) they could offer before I signed up with other lenders. They always came through!
Dave Ramsey was talking to a guy that called in that was being sucked under by the 16% interest loan on his Dodge pickup truck.
Ramsey asked the guy where he got the loan and it was Chrysler's own finance company or something.
Ramsey said "I didn't know they did anything that subprime."
It's possible that Ford might be into subprime auto loans and FICO may have looked at this and decided to code some of them CFA, of course I don't know that. Only FICO would know, like most of what their algorithm decides to do to you after it's too late to understand it will happen if you do the thing. 
The thing about undesirable loans that have interest rates high enough to destroy you, is they target people who have no money and live on the wrong side of the tracks and give them to them and tell them be glad we're even talking to you at all.
Be careful with those.
As for CFAs, I didn't even know that was a thing. Now I know to avoid them. So I guess this forum is useful for something other than sheer amusement with the "I just got out of bankruptcy court and now I want a boat, which I shall park on my landlord's property." stories.
There's more info I found on "CFAs".
