How would someone with a FICO score around lets say...810

[Anonymous]

improve their score?  Or would it just be really hard?

[Anonymous]

Time....

[tufa4311]

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@Anonymous wrote:

improve their score?  Or would it just be really hard?

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Well, there really is no reason to do that other than for fun - over 800+ will already get you the best of everything (or maybe your just kind of, maybe a little, bragging right now . I would usually say list all all your stats but, again, with an 800+ there wouldn't really be anything to fix. I assume you are below 10% on your UTIL, don't have a derog, always pay on time, don't have too much credit to be a potential liability, won't be adding a new account, have zero inquiries and don't plan to add any...if all of this is so then the only thing you can work on is time a.k.a. AAoA (average age of accounts) - ask around, maybe someone you know can make time move faster.

[tufa4311]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Time....

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my point exactly, you just posted while I was still typing!

[Anonymous]

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@tufa4311 wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

improve their score?  Or would it just be really hard?

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Well, there really is no reason to do that other than for fun - over 800+ will already get you the best of everything (or maybe your just kind of, maybe a little, bragging right now . I would usually say list all all your stats but, again, with an 800+ there wouldn't really be anything to fix. I assume you are below 10% on your UTIL, don't have a derog, always pay on time, don't have too much credit to be a potential liability, won't be adding a new account, have zero inquiries and don't plan to add any...if all of this is so then the only thing you can work on is time a.k.a. AAoA (average age of accounts) - ask around, maybe someone you know can make time move faster.

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I don't have 800.  Was just curious what would have to be done to actually make improvements haha. 

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@tufa4311 wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

improve their score?  Or would it just be really hard?

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Well, there really is no reason to do that other than for fun - over 800+ will already get you the best of everything (or maybe your just kind of, maybe a little, bragging right now . I would usually say list all all your stats but, again, with an 800+ there wouldn't really be anything to fix. I assume you are below 10% on your UTIL, don't have a derog, always pay on time, don't have too much credit to be a potential liability, won't be adding a new account, have zero inquiries and don't plan to add any...if all of this is so then the only thing you can work on is time a.k.a. AAoA (average age of accounts) - ask around, maybe someone you know can make time move faster.

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I don't have 800.  Was just curious what would have to be done to actually make improvements haha. 

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Well, you can't get to 800 without a clean set of reports. At that point "improvement" is nothing more than keeping UTI down, maintaining perfect payment history accross mutiple cards and all credit types (revolving, installment, mortgage), and letting accounts age.

[Anonymous]

Lots of hard work. I certainly don't understand FICO scoring but saw them all drop in May below 800 when I went on an APP spree when I opened up 8 new accounts. My AAoA is now at 5.8 years, and have lots of INQs EX:9; EQ: 6 and TU: 9 since the beginning of this year. This is why I'm in the garden because, you can never assume just because you're at 800 that you can just pick and choose what CC you want. I was turned down by FNBO for a stupid Sheetz gas card because of my INQs, and that was after I got a preapproved letter from them.

When the month of May started, my scores were EQ:803 TU: 813 and EX: 786 - they bottomed out when they started reporting. EQ dropped as low as 784, TU to 796 and EX to 786. As you see in my signature they have started to climb slowly again. On Sunday when all my CC's reported $0 balances except my HD card which has a $1,170 balance, my EX dropped on Sunday from 791 to 787; today my EQ jumped from 793 to 798. How in the heck does that happen? 

Anyway, bottom line is there's always room for improvement. I've never paid late since 1980, I was once up to my ears in debt (over $40k in CC debt alone) and now I'm dealing with a much lower AAoA and lots of INQs. I hope once those recent INQs drop that the scores will go up a bit more. No, I'm not bragging, but I wanted to let you know even at around 800 or more, things aren't always as they appear. I know what areas to improve on, hence the Garden. I also have to keep fumbling around with how many cards and how much to report each month to tinker with the scores to go up.

[NRB525]

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@Anonymous wrote:

improve their score?  Or would it just be really hard?

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FICO is a risk scoring model. The higher your score, the lower your risk.

The first phase is to build a file over time with no lates. That requires some borrowing, which is a risk, but builds your payment history, which FICO likes to see in order to see you may not be as bad a risk as they first thought.

After you get to 800, however, to get past that toward 850, you have to continue reducing your risk factors. That means you pretty much have to pay down all debt to extremely low amounts (but not zero), in other words stop borrowing, until you are only at a low maintenance level of CC debt, and likely a low remaining balance on a mortgage or other term loan. This is all to continue to reduce your perceived risk profile.

So, to get to 850, I think one has to be almost not borrowing anything, only slightly more than zero borrowing, to show zero risk of default. And then that gets into the catch-22: If you are at 850, you could borrow all you wanted, but as soon as you borrow anything, your score will plummet because now you are showing you are a risk again.

850 is certainly a valid goal, but it's for show, not for borrowing.

[Thomas_Thumb]

Credit scores in the 780 to 810 range represent a very low risk to lenders. Short term fluctuations of +/- 10 points for active credit users are best viewed as noise factors. Look for trends over the long term. If scores hover around 800, further increases are unlikely to have an impact with lenders.

Manage borrowing, not score, and the rest should come with time.

[NRB525]

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

Credit scores in the 780 to 810 range represent a very low risk to lenders. Short term fluctuations of +/- 10 points for active credit users are best viewed as noise factors. Look for trends over the long term. If scores hover around 800, further increases are unlikely to have an impact with lenders.

Manage borrowing, not score, and the rest should come with time.

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True, you and I know that, and in the real world that makes the most sense. But the FICO algorithm, in order to get to 850, wants to see almost no borrowing. Zero risk of default, not just very low risk.