Hi everyone,
My name is Christina, and I am new to these boards. I wanted to join in order to get some feedback from "real" people who get it and care about their credit, rather than 'yes' men/women of credit companies.
I am a member of Chase bank, and recently, they've begun to offer something called "Credit Journey" to its members. It appears that it's linked to the TransUnion Vantage score.
I accessed it 2 weeks ago and it says that my score is 625 - I almost fell off my chair. At the end of last year, I was told when I was going for a pre-approved auto loan that my score was 705 (not great, but not '625' level). When it broke down my score factors, the top reason was that my oldest account is too new. My oldest accounts are two credit cards that have been open for 13 years.
I was only late once on three of my credit cards 10 years ago (October 2007, to be exact).... I have not been late on any of my cards since (and my newest card is about 2.5 years old). I have never had anything go into collections. I successfully paid off an auto loan this January that was never late in the almost 6 years I had it.
But I do have a very high debt-to-credit ratio (I have 9 credit cards, and my utilization is 50% or higher on all of them), and I have ample public student loan debt ($170k, although it's not in 'active' collections yet since I'm wrapping up my dissertation and am technically a FT student while I do that).
CareCredit offers its users a 'MyFico' score (I don't know which Fico score it is, sorry for my ignorance) and as of late last week, it said it was 696. Why are these so different? There was no contact information to inquire about this, and I don't really know what to do to improve it.
I want everything in good order so I can apply for a competitive mortgage in a couple of years with my husband, so any help you guys can provide about what to do would be helpful. Thank you!
Best,
Christina
