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What does FICO consider "recent" in the terms of late payments

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Anonymous
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What does FICO consider "recent" in the terms of late payments

I have been building my credit for about 1.5 years now.  Started at 510 and now I'm at 680.  I would like to break the 700 mark.  Every time I check my credit it states that I have a "recent late payment" .  My last late payment was 1 year 10 months ago.  How long is a late payment considered "recent."  I am assuming that at the two year mark I will be clear of "recent" late payments.

 

 Also, I'm considering taking out an auto loan.  In the past this hurt my credit for a few months but once I paid down the amount I was fine.  If I pay off my next car loan in 4 months I assume that my credit will be unchanged or improved afterwards.  I will keep another car loan open that is with a 40% balance.

 

I consider new accounts to be less than 6 months old and accounts older than 1 year are in the clear.  I know that the average age is also important. 

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JBoswell
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Re: What does FICO consider "recent" in the terms of late payments

1. I can't really answer this question to a certainty... I have heard that late payments can reflect negitively on the account for 4 years (*yikes*) but again, I'm not 100% sure. Even so, as long as you are current and continue to pay on time, the more distance between you and the late payments the better your score will be and will continue to come up little by little.

 

2. I actually just recently had to get a new car, and along with it a new auto loan, intitially it did cause a small drop in my score (although not a substantial as I thought it was going to be) and now after only 3 months of paying heavily on the loan my score is already better than it was before I got it. So it sounds like what you are intending to do should work out just fine.

 

3. Again, I can't really say 100% but, I believe that "new accounts" are less than a year old, and accounts over one year old are, as you said, in the clear. The average age is important, because it attributes to the length of your credit history. Currently my husband's oldest account showing on his credit report is from 2005, and *most* of them are from around 2007 - which is still about 2 years old - and he is still considered to "not have substantial credit history" so the older your accounts the better Smiley Happy

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