EXCEPTIONAL amt of debt?

[Anonymous]

i'm always watching my reports on experian, and it's got a section under Scores > score ingredients:

amount of debt: Very Good (8% revolving util, 2 accts w/ balances, $188 total balance)

how can i get "Exceptional" amount of debt. even when i let just one card report and with a low util, it's never told me exceptional before, just "Very Good." what is the criteria?

and if utilization really has no memory, how come in my credit report under payment history for each card it lists the highest balance that i ever had for that card?

[Jnbmom]

Time...............Your file is too young let you accounts age

[Anonymous]

if that is true, why does everyone say that util has no memory?

[Jnbmom]

Even with very low utilization, your file is too new.

[AllZero]

As BrutalBodyShots would say, "it's front end fluff". CMS verbiage to make one feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Best to pay attention to the data, numbers, negative reason codes, etc.

[Anonymous]

The "Highest Balance" field on your credit report is not used in the utilization calculation ; it is simply a record of the highest balance reported to the credit bureau for a specific account.

As BBS would say the Exceptional, Very Good ratings etc. are just "fluff" presented by the credit management software., in this case by Experian. It has no effect on FICO scores.

[Anonymous]

yeah its kind of a fluff to show where you are doing good and bad.

i just looked through all the 3b reports i ever pulled and noticed that my payment history became exceptional after 6mo of ontime payment. so i have a feeling that the exceptional rating is gained when your overall util has 6 consecutive months of a very low percentage. mine has been a wee bit too high sometimes so that's why i have only "very good"

[Anonymous]

Sometime in the past year or so, maybe a little more, there was a thread that BBS started that addressed this fluff and its ability to mislead. His point was a good one - with payment history, there is no good, or fair, or very good, and exceptional should be renamed.

There’s a very simple relationship established when you open a line of credit - you borrow the bank’s money and you pay it back on an established schedule every month.

Every. Single. Time.

If you do this and never, ever miss a payment, you aren’t exceptional, you’re holding up your end of the deal. You are paying as agreed. If you miss one payment, you’ve broken the deal and your payment history is poor. Open and shut.

This fluff verbiage is just coddling really, and in the case of a CMS like CK or NerdWallet, is likely used to encourage you to app for more cards, through them they hope, so you can earn them referral fees. It’s not a gauge of your behavior as a credit consumer, it’s a way to make you feel like you’re doing well enough that maybe you will be approved for that Citi DC card they say you have excellent chances for, despite your scores being lower than the known minimum for acceptance (that’s one they push on me, even though I know my scores aren’t high enough and the Citi prequal doesn’t show me that card).

Bottom line - don’t bother with the fluff statements, no matter where they come from. Credit is a numbers game and only the numbers matter.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

i'm always watching my reports on experian, and it's got a section under Scores > score ingredients:

amount of debt: Very Good (8% revolving util, 2 accts w/ balances, $188 total balance)

how can i get "Exceptional" amount of debt. even when i let just one card report and with a low util, it's never told me exceptional before, just "Very Good." what is the criteria?

and if utilization really has no memory, how come in my credit report under payment history for each card it lists the highest balance that i ever had for that card?

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As others have pointed out, it's not a formal scoring classification. But I would bet that if your aggregate revolving utilization were 6% or less you would pick up the "Exceptional" accolade.

[Anonymous]

Great replies above from other members regarding the CMS fluff in using words like "exceptional" and "very good" to assign arbitrary "ratings" for different scoring categories.

OP, think of it this way.  You could have two otherwise identical profiles, both at the same (say, 5%) overall utilization.  A CMS might say that both of these individuals have "exceptional" revolving debt.  What you don't know however is that one individual may have $3000 in total limits where the other has $400k in overall limits.  Would we really say that someone with $150 in revolving debt is "equal" [rating wise] to someone with $20k in revolving debt?  CMS fluff may lead one to believe so, when clearly both individuals are not created equal.