Credit Bucket to Bucket

[Bop]

 Often forum member report that they are promoted to new Credit Category and lost some points. In past 6 months I was promoted twice to new Credit Category and lost over 30 points.

A common understanding is that promoting to new category may cost some points in short term but in the long run it helps to improve credit score. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any post in the forum where a member said s/he  improved her/his score because of promotion to new credit category.

So , my question is , Does any one here who was benefited by this Credit promotion in long run? If so how much, or how?

[Anonymous]

Yes-

But you have to improvove your overall credit profile ABOVE the rest of your peers in your bucket.

[haulingthescoreup]

Any idea how long this generally takes, as long as you behave yourself? When I play with the score simulator, it seems to be at least a year before I see any serious projected score increase.

[Anonymous]

How do you know when you are placed in a different credit category, or bucket? Are you told by your CR monitoring service,or what?

[haulingthescoreup]

Sylvia, do you have Score Watch? If so, when you get an alert, there is a section that explains the reason. It will often happen at a time when your reports don't change. Click on the score alert, and you will get this message (it's the second bullet):

-----------------
Changes to your credit report

Your FICO® score went down on a day when there were no credit alerts on your Equifax Credit Report™. This can happen if:

* There was a change on your credit report that lowered your score but did not trigger an alert. For example, the balance on an account might have increased enough to lower your score, but not enough to trigger a balance increase alert. --**didn't happen**
* You moved from one category of credit users to another as time passed. For example, you may have transitioned from the category "consumers with a new credit history" to the category "consumers with a two- to five-year credit history". As a result, your credit report is evaluated differently, causing a slight change in your score. The good news is that moving between categories like this usually offers you the potential to reach a higher FICO score in the future.
-----------------

If you don't have Score Watch, and suddenly you score dropped like a stone --or maybe a pebble-- check your reports to see if anything at all happened between your last score and this one. If you don't see anything that explains the drop, then maybe you've changed buckets.

[Anonymous]

No hauling, I have EXP's Triple Advantage I get from freecreditreport.com. It's very timely. In fact it has alerted me about a cc approval before I even get the cc.

But it only alerts me to:
Key changes include:
* New accounts(gives date and cl, when made available to CRA)
* Inquiries(gives date, CRA)
* Potentially negative information(nothing has shown, just blank)
* Public records(nothing has shown, just blank)
* Address changes(of course nothing has changed.I've lived here for 31 years)

Maybe it's time I graduate to S.W. But honestly, I've been so confused as to which one to get. There must be a bazillion of them out there to choose from. S.W. sounds more informative that what I have. Plus some of the bad press I heard back in Sept. about S.W. not reporting, or late reporting, kinda skiddish of it. But I guess I'll take the plunge. I know the folks there are constantly striving to improve their product.

Congrats on the score increases! And many thanks for great explanation!

[haulingthescoreup]

I think that since the buckets (tiers, etc.) are a FICO creation, any notices are only going to come from a FICO service like Score Watch. I'm feeling my way in the dark, though, so that could be completely wrong! Even then, you're only going to get an alert when EQ re-buckets. I'm just guessing that the other two changed as well, because they dropped too, although not as much as EQ did.

I go back and forth about whether to keep it. I was thinking about canceling it right before this happened, but this has me wavering. Without it I could still get my EQ and TU FICO scores and play with the simulators, but if there was yet another weird score change, I would only be able to guess whether it was due to re-bucketing.

edit: Also, after you use your two free EQ scores (part of the Score Watch deal), any time you get a score alert, you can buy another EQ score for $10.95 instead of $15.95, plus you can use a discount code on top of that. But no discounts on EX or TU.

Message Edited by haulingthescoreup on 10-20-2007 11:37 AM

[Anonymous]

Thanks hauling! I've just looked at S.W. in detail in the products section of the menu bar, and I'm sold. That video completely explains the program. It does a LOT more than what I have.

Plus, if you sign up for a year instead of monthly, the cost drops to $7.50/mo. Less than what I'm paying now.

I'm so bad about asking questions, before I put a little effort into searching for the results on my own. I guess I'm like ask.com, and want "instant getification". That menu bar contains sooooo much info, and a lot of general questions can be answered from it if people would only read it all. What can I say? I like to talk. Appreciate your patience.

[haulingthescoreup]

I think this whole area is so overwhelming that you have to ask a lot of questions, just so that you can figure out where and how to start your own search!

By the way, I also have TrueCredit. Score Watch is only going to track Equifax. My scores are so all over the place that I like following all three. This is probably overkill, but for now it helps me figure stuff out, and one day I'll start backing off. So I keep telling myself, anyway!

[Bop]

Yes, I have to keep doing better and better every month to get better score. I understand why FICO move people from Bucket to Bucket, but my question is " Has any one seen score improvement because they are in different bucket"? Paying down C utilization will improve score but has anyone seen direct impact of score improvement just because they are in different bucket?