@Anonymous wrote:
A few charge offs, cable company, a small $300 credit card while I was in college, and maybe some other small $100 thing all 3 years old or older.
Derogs are always major issues and should be addressed first. As indicated above, the Rebuilding subforum is the place to read up. Make sure you do your research before taking action as paying can make things worse in certain cases.
@Anonymous wrote:
"proportion of balances to limits is too high"- Is this the proportion of balances to limits only on revolving credit or is it based upon my installment(student) loan as well?
It's the installments. SInce they're new the proportion will be high. I wouldn't worry too much over this as the balance will decrease over time.
@Anonymous wrote:
This being the case, I can easily pay down my credit card and hold a 5-10% balance on it carried each month ( can I charge more than 30% and pay it each month and keep the util to the balance carried over or is it trickier than that?)
You really don't want to carry any balances. Carrying a balance subject you to interest and genereally negates any rewards that you might get. 30% is the generally recommended max for utilization but you can charge whatever you want. It's reported utilization that matters. Most card report at statement end (verify with your specific cards) so you can pay down balances right before they report to manage reported utilization. Before appying for anything optimize your utilization by ensuring that only one card reports a balance with 10% or less utilization.
@Anonymous wrote:
I am pretty frustrated with this, being judged by the things that happened while I was a struggling adult student in school, paying my own way, which is so rare these days... and now that I have worked my butt off to get into a good position I can't do anything with it because everything is a catch .22
It's not a catch 22 really. It takes time to recover and that's why you want to avoid derogs. Creditor can only assess you based on your history. They can't read the future any more than anyone else can. Payment history is the biggest factor in credit scoring at 35%:
http://www.myfico.com/crediteducation/whatsinyourscore.aspx
Don't be discouraged. You're not the only one going through this sort of thing by a long shot. Many myFICO users are building or rebuilding. I had to rebuild from a BK and it took me many years. Prepare yourself to be in this for the long haul.
@Anonymous wrote:
On another note, the engineer in me tells me that someone should compile a TON of data about inputs to credit files and corresponding outcomes so that we can reverse engineer a mathematical model of the FICO scoring criteria. Bang!, science wins again.
It's not always that easy to reverse engineer based on outputs -- especially considering the number of different FICO models in use -- but if you're curious look up Bob Wang and his charts on one of the other credit sites. The link I provided above has been more than sufficient for me to use as a resource for rebuilding even without knowing the specific scoring algorithms used. I always advise focusing on what's in the reports versus fixating on the numbers. Scores are are based on the reports and a good, clean report will yield good scores.
Also, don't overlook the Understanding FICO Scoring subforum.
@Anonymous wrote:
This is why they don't want daily, all time access to accounts. It would be easy to extrapolate their formulas with that much access.
You can use a CMS with daily pulls if you want but they won't give you FICO's. See the CMS Thread. I doubt FICO would have problem with selling you scores every day if you want. It would just get incredibly expensive very quickly for all 3 CRA's.
