Credit mix - what am I missing?

[Shooting-For-800]

Mine is exceptional.  I have:

1 car loan

15 bank credit cards

4 store credit cards

maybe 8 student loans

NO mortgage

GL!

[Remedios]

---

@SouthJamaica wrote:

---

@Anonymous wrote:

SJ, thank you for confirming the existence of Exceptional!

Over the next few years as I slowly rebuild, I will continue to check my, "Credit mix," rating. I do not plan to become SJJ (junior) though, so hopefully ~5 or so card accounts does the trick. We shall see!

---

Thank goodness you are smarter than I am

---

I dropped the phone and it fell on my face (again) when I read this. These giggles were exceptional. True story. 

[Remedios]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

SJ, thank you for confirming the existence of Exceptional!

Over the next few years as I slowly rebuild, I will continue to check my, "Credit mix," rating. I do not plan to become SJJ (junior) though, so hopefully ~5 or so card accounts does the trick. We shall see!

---

Well, SJ manages them well, so number is  not an issue. He's also very helpful as you've witnessed in this thread, so maybe being SJJ would be an exceptional thing. 

[Caardvark]

I definitely do not have the thick profile of SJJ but also have an "Exceptional" Mix. It does make one curious as to what makes one profile exceptional vs very good when they have the same attributes.

---

@Anonymous wrote:

ITD and BBS, thank you for the responses. Just wanted to ensure I had all of the bases covered.

Within the requirements backlog of Experian's website content product manager, there had to be some method to attain Exceptional in Experian's category rating? Despite the fluff of their made-up descriptions, I would agree with the assignment of their ratings to my other categories. I wonder if anyone out there in MyFico land has Exceptional in this category, and would be curious to learn about their credit mix.

---

[Anonymous]

I'mTheDevil made an interesting guess (post #2) which was that the front-end software might be including "number of accounts" as a scoring factor -- and if so, it might well be parking this in the Credit Mix category.

Although as BBS and others have observed, the programmers of any front-end summary page often invent scoring factors that do not exist at all inside the back-end algorithm that generates the score (or if they do exist, have a very different weight), there is in this case some evidence that "number of accounts" does in fact matter.  Contributor Thomas Thumb and others have discussed this based on explicit negative reason statements that they see.  Last I remember the guess was that a small penalty exists when you have only (say) 4-5 open accounts or if your total number of closed and open accounts together was fewer than (say) 9.

Curiously there also appears to be a small penalty (detected from an analysis of reason codes by Revelate) when you have too many accounts as well.  The sweet spot may be something like at least 8 open accounts and at least 10 total accounts, but no more than 17 open accounts.

PS.  When a person's "number of accounts" is quite small (e.g. 1-3 accounts) then it can have a far more pronounced effect on that person's score, by shunting him into a scorecard reserved for very "thin" profiles.  Our OP has enough accounts to not be considered thin in that sense.

[Anonymous]

@Remedios - please don't interpret my comment as disrepsecting SJ - feel quite the opposite.

---

@Anonymous wrote:

Last I remember the guess was that a small penalty exists when you have only (say) 4-5 open accounts or if your total number of closed and open accounts together was fewer than (say) 9.

Curiously there also appears to be a small penalty (detected from an analysis of reason codes by Revelate) when you have too many accounts as well.  The sweet spot may be something like at least 8 open accounts and at least 10 total accounts, but no more than 17 open accounts.

---

CGID, that is very interesting info. My Very Good rating includes 6 Open accounts and 9 Closed. Just for yucks I checked DW, and she has 4 Open, 5 Closed and is also rated Very Good for Credit mix. Aligns with your analysis.

[Caardvark]

Interesting theory. I do have 9 open accounts

[Anonymous]

Yep, same rating as OP with 13 open and 7 closed.

[SouthJamaica]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

@Remedios - please don't interpret my comment as disrepsecting SJ - feel quite the opposite.

---

I certainly didn't interpret it that way @Anonymous and I'm sure @Remedios didn't either

[Remedios]

@Anonymous  I did not interpret it as disrespect.  While i really meant what I said about SJ, rest was a joke involved abundant use of the word "excellent", mainly because I find those descriptors useless. 

While they do tell you that everything is not optimized, they offer very little guidance on why. 

Hope that clarifies it.