@hwturner17 wrote:Just pulled my equifax report. One of the factors negatively effecting my score is something i've never seen before.
"The percentage of department store accounts or charge cards to all of the accounts in your credit file"
I have 6 cc's, only one of which is a department store card. It's a home depot card. I have 5 loans, one of which is a mortgage, an auto loan and three student loans. Does this just mean I have too many cards in general or is it referring to my cc's in general? I have literally never seen anyone referrence this. How is this possible? I've heard of people on this forum having 20-30 credit cards. There's no way this is really a thing, otherwise, people wouldn't have as many credit cards.
Never seen it before but it's a ratio of your store / charge cards to likely your revolving tradelines or maybe to the aggregate file. Given that you list one store card, one CU card, and 3 national bank cards in your signature, doesn't seem like it's much of a concern: what's the sixth out of curiosity?
I'd ask two significant things: what was your score, and where on the list was this? Anecdotally the higher your score the more dubious the negative factors are (they have to tell you SOMETHING) and usually the ones further down the list are much less relevant.
It is interesting as we've debated whether there was a tradeline quality evaluation in the algorithm, vis a vis the Michelin star system for rating restaurants (e.g. mortgage = 4, auto = 3, personal = 2, student loan = 1 for installment loan example) but this is one of the first things I've seen from a bureau that suggested such an animal exists in the sense that national bank credit card > store card, which we've also pontificated but never went anywhere in terms of being confirmed or anything.
Thank you for posting this, interesting datapoint.
