Hi Credit Guy In Dixie,
My Alliant loan was for $500 and it reported to TU and EQ with a current balance of $80 on April 30, 2016. A few days later, I did a second pay-down after the initial May 5 auto-pay went through leaving the loan with a balance under 9% but that was not reflected on the April 30 credit reporting. Maybe I will get a more robust FICO jump next month. No derogatory items on any report. One card reporting a $600 balance with a $30,000 limit. Total utilization less than 1%. As explained below, I had one closed installment loan reporting on two of my reports. The Alliant loan is the only open installment loan.
There is so much happening on my report right now, and so quickly, that I certainly can't figure out the AAofA at all. It has definitely crossed an integer in the last few days, more like 8 integers. A totally new Discover account reported the day before the Alliant report and I had a very odd situation with Amex that reported about the same time. I got an Amex Blue Cash Everyday and a Platinum a few weeks ago and neither has yet reported. What did report for the first time last week is an Amex Blue originally opened in 1999. My girlfriend died last year and she had an Amex Blue which she last used in January and February 2015. I had paid the bill those two months but never used the card. It had a zero balance and about 50,000 membership rewards. Soon after I applied for my own Amex cards it occurred to me that I should let Amex know that she had died and to close her account. When I called, something very surprising happened. The rep asked me if I wanted to "assume" her account. I had been monitoring her Amex account online monthly since last year to make sure there was no unauthorized use and I knew there was no use at all and her account had a zero balance. The rep said I would become responsible for the balance, which was zero, and the accumulated reward points would come along with the account, which Amex would transfer to my name, so I took it. Well, Amex Blue account entered my report a few days ago with an open date of 1999, her original opening date. This hit my report a couple of days before the Alliant loan reported. So you might think that the boost of AAofA from a 17 year old account suddenly appearing out of thin air might offset the drop in AAofA brought on by the new Alliant account and the new Discover account, right? Well it didn't. My TU report went from an average age of 26 years 5 months on February 19, 2016, based on a MyFico triple bureau report to 21 years 3 months on May 9, 2016, based upon a Credit Check Total report. My EX went from 28 years 1 month to 20 years 10 months, for the same time period. While EQ went from 22 years 9, months on April 22, 2016 to 19 years 4 months on May 9, 2016. The TU and EX are big drops and don't intuitively make sense to me, but there is obviously a lot I do not understand about AAofA. Before the new accounts started reporting, I had a total of 15 account but only one account that was truly open a bank credit card with a $30,000 limit. One or maybe two accounts were reporting on some reports as open when in reality they were closed. And the three bureaus were not necessarily reporting the identical accounts. I had a student loan, for example, opened in 1996 and closed in 2009 that was on TU and EQ but omitted entirely from my 2016 EX reports (though it did appear on EX in 2013). Oddly, my total number of accounts was the same on all three reports (15) because of a store card closed in 2007 which was and is still reporting on EX but is omitted from TU or EQ. So the short answer to all my yapping is that my AAofA seems odd and is totally indecipherable to me. I spent a couple of hours last night trying to calculate it on paper and the numbers I came up with did not match the commercially prepared numbers. I'm usually not mathematically limited either, I was a CPA for 17 years before I changed careers. I tried to get a computer wiz I know to make an Excel spreadsheet to calculate AAofA, not just for now but for dates in the future, and he wasn't able to incorporate the feature of calculating AAofA for a future date, so I abandoned that effort. From now on, am just going to accept whatever the commercial sites say my AAofA is. Sorry I can't contribute meaningful data points but my data is all over the place and isn't making sense during this period of rapid changes to my credit profile.
Yapsalot
