@ojefferyo wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I am a 55 yo woman with pretty good work habit. Majorly upset, I let my cap one Sony card get really high because of a 6 week hiatus from work. My fico took a 23 point drop. Not at all happy. Also how do all these college kids get such high limits on their card when they are in school? And several of them have many cards.
I wouldn't believe everything you read here on the internet, you can't possibly believe that almost everyone here makes $100k+ too do you? I don't know how many times I've seen people state that.
?
I have no reason to disbelieve that focused effort can get credit when one has short term limited resources but is in college with long term career prospects. These CCC look at the customer and realize these kids are only temporarily low on income. Payment history works to build credit even at low cash flow levels.
Of those posters who reveal their income, most are well under $100k.
One of the major reasons I think these"college kids" get high limits is because they actively seek to improve/establish credit. Thus when a lender sees someone with let's say only 6 months-1 yr of credit history apply for a card, they can see that they are either responsible with pristine payment history and good utilization or missed payments and high utilization. Based off of this short term impression, one can evaluate that the likelyhood of said person defaulting, missing payments, etc.
If I were a CCC I would rather take a minor risk to make an impression on these "college kids" so they might bank with me for the rest of their life, rather than take a risk on someone who I know has established spending/payment habits.
Most of the college kids on here actively seek information to improve their credit. I'd say that most of them are more credit savvy than your general population. Thus they are able to use their resources and plan ahead. I have a few AU cards which were crucial to establishing my credit early on. If I didn't use any of them then I would've had to waste more time to achieve what I have now. By using them and apping in 6 month increments I've been able to expedite this process. Even if you start without any AU cards it still would only take a year or two to get higher limit cards provided you have decent income.
speaking as one of these college kids, in my case, I'm still learning, and that probably goes for several others on here as well, why my scores are in the 700s already, I don't really know, but I've never missed a payment or carried a balance yet. There's a lot of information on here that has definitely helped me to understand what might cause a score decrease, and what affects it more heavily.
As for the people complaining about not getting CLIs after a few months, unfortunately my generation has grown up with more and more of an age of instant gratification, "I want this and I want it now" kind of mentality without so much of an understanding of how the system works. Yeah, I find it kind of annoying too, haha but it does make sense seeing as most cards have instant approvals, everything is instant, so 3 months to someone of that mentality would seem like a very long time, not that it makes them any more right 
Anyway, I think a lot of the college kids that visit more frequently, like myself, are really serious about learning about credit and how to establish good credit as early as possible, because it really is a helpful thing to have, at the very least, haha
@core wrote:What I don't understand is how these "kids" get 760-780 FICO scores with 6mos to 1 year of history, when a 50 year old person with no baddies might spend decades and barely reach those scores. And then these same kids whine about not getting CLIs after 3 months of having a card when their credit history is so "long". Puh-leeze.
Actually I do understand why. It's because of bucketing. But it just seems bass ackwards to me.
A lot of the categories that are used to calculate a FICO scores are weighted less for someone with shorter history. A 50 year old who has established credit for 32 yrs will always have a lower score than the younger "kid" if they both have low AAoA, but everything else is optimized. The FICO calculations are algorithms are made to prioritize risk rather than effort or age. Yeah, it's kinda stupid, but banks cold androids made to profit, I doubt they care about anything else.