Closed AU as Oldest Account

Anonymous · ‎09-30-2018

So recently on one of my bureaus, my oldest acct fell off ( a closed 12yr old CC in good standing in my name only). Thus, now my oldest acct is a CLOSED AU CC from 7yrs ago. Oldest open account is 5 months. Most fico sites are giving me my AAoA and not including that AU account in aaoa or aooa. My other bureaus, it is factoring in the closed 12yr acct but not the closed AU. My question is, is this merely incorrect or do closed AUs not count? If it were open would it be a factor?

Anonymous · ‎09-30-2018

@Anonymous wrote:
So recently on one of my bureaus, my oldest acct fell off ( a closed 12yr old CC in good standing in my name only). Thus, now my oldest acct is a CLOSED AU CC from 7yrs ago. Oldest open account is 5 months. Most fico sites are giving me my AAoA and not including that AU account in aaoa or aooa. My other bureaus, it is factoring in the closed 12yr acct but not the closed AU. My question is, is this merely incorrect or do closed AUs not count? If it were open would it be a factor?

How is it that some credit monitoring services are giving you a 12-year AoOA when that account is no longer on your report?

Anonymous · ‎09-30-2018

The bureaus where the acct still appears it shows as AoOA 12yrs (age of oldest account).
Bureaus not listing shows the oldest account as 6 months.

In other words all bureaus are not including the closed AU acct in AAoA nor is it factored in as oldest acct (on the bureau where it is the oldest acct)

Anonymous · ‎09-30-2018

Ah.... ok.

Well, this issue comes up pretty regularly here. The front-end summary page of a CMS says something, which makes the CMS user infer that the scoring algorithm (on the back end) is working a certain way. It often has to do with age related factors, or total credit limit, or utilization, or AUs, or any number of other things.

Unfortunately you cannot infer what a scoring model is doing on the back end from what a CMS front-end summary page says. The reason is that the front end summary page is made by completely different people. Even when we are talking about the myFICO Ultimate CMS, their summary page offers no certain insight into what the actual FICO alogorithm is doing behind the scenes.

In the case of FICO 8, it's possible that the model might be completely ignoring any AU account. The only way to know is to have a stable profile just before the AU account was first added and to pull the score -- and then pull the score just after the AU account appears. If there's a subsrantial change then FICO counted it. But sometimes FICO's secret "anti-abuse" algorithm gets triggered and FICO ignores an AU -- and no CMS will tell you whether that is true or not. The fact that different CMS's are saying different things just means their front end summary pages were programmed differently.

Anonymous · ‎09-30-2018

That makes sense and was along the lines I was thinking. I am going to try and decipher what FICO is actually calculating by comparing scores between the bureaus.

If the AU is not included my profile would be:

AAoA - 5 months

AoOA - 7 months

If it is:

AAoA - 1yr7mo

AoOA - 7yrs

Whats additionally interesting is that FICO was able to generate scores for me as SOON as I had just one open account with one month of history. This tells me perhaps it is factoring in the AU account however it may only have factored it in order to generate a score . Front CMS used to display the 1yr7mo AAoA and after I had an open account age to 6 months, it suddenly decreased to the non-AU data I posted above. So maybe it took it out of the equation after I had 6 months of open accounts

@Anonymous wrote:
Ah.... ok.

Well, this issue comes up pretty regularly here. The front-end summary page of a CMS says something, which makes the CMS user infer that the scoring algorithm (on the back end) is working a certain way. It often has to do with age related factors, or total credit limit, or utilization, or AUs, or any number of other things.

Unfortunately you cannot infer what a scoring model is doing on the back end from what a CMS front-end summary page says. The reason is that the front end summary page is made by completely different people. Even when we are talking about the myFICO Ultimate CMS, their summary page offers no certain insight into what the actual FICO alogorithm is doing behind the scenes.

In the case of FICO 8, it's possible that the model might be completely ignoring any AU account. The only way to know is to have a stable profile just before the AU account was first added and to pull the score -- and then pull the score just after the AU account appears. If there's a subsrantial change then FICO counted it. But sometimes FICO's secret "anti-abuse" algorithm gets triggered and FICO ignores an AU -- and no CMS will tell you whether that is true or not. The fact that different CMS's are saying different things just means their front end summary pages were programmed differently.

Anonymous · ‎09-30-2018

@Anonymous wrote:
That makes sense and was along the lines I was thinking. I am going to try and decipher what FICO is actually calculating by comparing scores between the bureaus.
If the AU is not included my profile would be:
AAoA - 5 months
AoOA - 7 months

If it is:
AAoA - 1yr7mo
AoOA - 7yrs

Whats additionally interesting is that FICO was able to generate scores for me as SOON as I had just one open account with one month of history. This tells me perhaps it is factoring in the AU account....

Great reasoning! You are almost certain to be right.