Also curious

[Anonymous]

I have noticed that some people with mulitple collections/derogs and even bankruptsy on their reports have higher scores than some that have only one derog and longer histories. I am not understanding how that works.

[Anonymous]

You can learn more how FICO scoring works here:

https://www.myfico.com/credit-education/whats-in-your-credit-score/

As you'll see derogs ("Payment History") and Length of Payment History are only two parts of one's score.  There are three other parts.  It's not hard for construct a profile that has a longer and better payment history, but also has high CC utilization, bad credit mix, and lots of new accounts.

[Anonymous]

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wrote:
I have noticed that some people with mulitple collections/derogs and even bankruptsy on their reports have higher scores than some that have only one derog and longer histories. I am not understanding how that works.

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Some of those accounts also have long thick histories with lots of different good accounts to to offset the bad and minimise the bad. Also some of those old derogatory are paid off and well older. About to fall off soon. There are five main categories. Each of them makes up a part of the pie. The only thing absolute with baddies is the top end score us lower than with no baddies. 

[Anonymous]

Good points, Ben.  One guy can have a lot more derogs but perhaps his all happened a long time ago and are paid off. 

There are also less well known facts, such as the way FICO 8 ignores all collections, paid or unpaid, if they are under $99.  Thus one guy could have five small unpaid collections compared to another guy with one recent Day 30 late.  The guy with the collections will appear as though he had no derogs (to FICO 8) whereas the other guy will have a recent account being delinquent.