FICO Scoring Buckets (or "Scorecards")

[Anonymous]

I reviewed today 2 CRs with 0 negs, both with oldest accounts just 12 yrs old. They had different number of inqs and different number of total accounts. Neither were thin files. Both had installments and revolving accounts.

CR #1 was in bucket "X" (better quality bucket), avg age turned 7+ years and oldest account 12 yrs.

CR #2 was in bucket "Z", (lower quality bucket) had -6 years avg age and oldest account was 12 yrs.

They acted different on the sim so I suspect different buckets. CR #2 was older with more accounts too.

[marty56]

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ilovepizza wrote:
What do you think about: (no neg buckets)
(I am only guessing)

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Interesting.  If there was a major derog score bucket, how would it work?  What criteria would FICO use to help someone who is in the major derog score bucket or hurt them for that matter

I dont think it is util since there is no util score bucket and util is not time based.  I dont think is the number of them since there is no evidence here that someone would loose more points for getting another major derog if they allready have one.

I suppose that major derog score bucket could work as a negative bucket where I prevents you from reaching say 800 if you have one.  That would be true in my case.  But then util would be a bucket for the same reason.

[Anonymous]

I haven't seen UTL affect buckets on the low UTL end up to I think 25% based on my UTL only. Don't know if lets say (guessing) 50% UTL or higher shifts down a bucket? I'll let you know next time my UTL gets up that high. I don't know as much about buckets with negative accounts. Mostly the CRs that I view have no negatives.

[haulingthescoreup]

Per myFICO big kahuna, util doesn't drive buckets. Otherwise, we'd be shifting in and out of buckets every time our reports updated. It's age, derogs, and apparently combinations thereof.

[Math_Rocks]

Not trying to TJ. I know I'm neither a mod nor a super contributor, but could one of you please start a new thread explaining what you are discussing. I've heard the term bucket thrown around a lot but I don't know precisely what they and how one determines if they are in a bucket. Thanks!

[smallfry]

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@haulingthescoreup wrote:
Per myFICO big kahuna, util doesn't drive buckets. Otherwise, we'd be shifting in and out of buckets every time our reports updated. It's age, derogs, and apparently combinations thereof.

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There is a poster over at BC who has a BK7 from 2001 with an average age of 4 years with scores over 775 each bureau. I have 2 public records on EX and EQ had 2 on TU until last month. When the tax lien dropped from TU there was no score change so I am thinking 1 derog is the same as 2 maybe even more. This was a mid month pull with no other changes to my TU report.

My utilization has remained at 1% for over 1 year baddies have aged positives have aged yet my scores are dropping. New accounts are not welcomed in the derog bucket.My scores were only marginally lower over a year ago with an average age of 6 years 56% utilization and 12K available credit. Had a brand new car loan as well. BofA is my last credit card application.

[haulingthescoreup]

With public records and derogs, you can have 1 or 31. The buckets are driven by presence of a public record or collection. It's not till the last one falls off that things change. Obviously it's important to keep working to clean things up, but there probably won't be much of a score change until you finally kill the last one off.

Very discouraging to go through all the work to remove one and see no change, but you just have to tell yourself that you're that much closer.

[smallfry]

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@haulingthescoreup wrote:
With public records and derogs, you can have 1 or 31. The buckets are driven by presence of a public record or collection. It's not till the last one falls off that things change. Obviously it's important to keep working to clean things up, but there probably won't be much of a score change until you finally kill the last one off.

Very discouraging to go through all the work to remove one and see no change, but you just have to tell yourself that you're that much closer.

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Actually Hauling removing the tax lien from TU couldn't have been easier. They were just too cheap to pay for verification. It was off within 2 days. I'll continue to use my cards intelligently and PIF every month but there is no sense in paying for scores anymore just to aggravate myself. As long as I experience no AA from my 6 issuers I am fine with it. Funny thing is if I had stopped after I got my Penfed and Sea Miles cards last May my scores would be 30 points higher at a minimum.

[Anonymous]

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@Math_Rocks wrote:
I don't know precisely what they and how one determines if they are in a bucket. Thanks!

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Scoring is divided up by groups of people that have similar credit reports. These people fall under a different scoring formula. Some people will benefit from actions and other will have score drops for the same actions. We call these scoring groups buckets. We are trying to identify which buckets people are in to know if certain actions would help or hurt our scores. But mostly just because we like the challenge of learning this fun puzzle. The entertainment keeps us motivated to work on our credit reports.

[Anonymous]

From what I've read regarding scorecards (or buckets) it seems a lot of people are misinterpreting what it means.  Some people seem to be implying that a person with 'bad' credit can have a higher FICO score than a person with 'good' credit which would defeat the whole purpose of the FICO score.   Assuming FICO scores are normally distributed (bell curve), all it means is that the closer you get to the tails of the distribution the less future impact factors that put you there will have on your score.  e.g. negative factors will have less percentage impact to a person already sitting in the lower end while positive factors will have less percentage impact to someone in the high end. and the converse is also true: positive factors will have greater impact to people in the low end while negative factors have more impact to the high end people.