Basically if you have a clean file you win.
If you have a dirty file, then it's a lot harder to get past certain breakpoints and absolutely excluded from the highest scoring buckets.
Medical collections under FICO 8 if they're >$100 count. That plus your fairly new history is around a 700 give or take 20 points for individual tweaks to files FWIW. FICO 9 discounts these, and whee you see the 790 there. Interestingly enough my own FICO 9's are around 780 too, not as much disparity but my negatives are older and I have more positive payment history than you do.
Re: child support as installment, not sure if that fully counts or not: it's not hurting per se but might not be helping much either. Not sure, if you can spare tying up the $500 for a few months I'd pull the share secured loan trick just to see in your case, but end of the day your major score increases will come from time passing and getting the negatives off. Cleaning up the balances will help a bit.
@Bigshrimp wrote:Thanks Rev for the reply
Guess the reason why I asked about the Child support is bc over the past year EX has been the lowest of the 3 with only one PIF collection showing during this time, while TU and EQ had 5 showing each during the same time period...1 dropped off of TU past month and 4 dropped off of EQ (guessing where the 22 pt jump come from). Otherwise all 3 reports are similar...I think I would have a better understanding if Ex would of been the higher score of the 3...I could say to myself that the extra collections on the other 2 had more wieght but with the big jump on EQ is why im questioning things...
I have no Debt showing expect for revolving accounts and when cap1 and chase report I will have less then $100 showing on one card...
About the shared sucured loan..Would that benifit me at all if I have an closed installment already showing? I'v heard from others that it wouldnt really help if you already have an installment listed...
I have found in my experience that EX is the tougher of the 3 scoring, but collections fall off much sooner...
Im just looking at my long term credit health...I only have one goal and that is to buy a house one day...I have no desire to add any more cards...Just looking for that moral victory of hitting 700 on all...
FICO 8 and maybe 9 want you to have an open installment loan, and for highest scoring, at a pretty balance to original loan ratio. That second part pretty much counts in aggregate across all installment lines that are counted. Also wants open credit cards too incidentally, this was a departure from FICO 04 and earlier. So yes, the share secured line might help you, or it might not with the child support but I suspect that might not be counted as an actual loan... the devil is in the reported tradeline details to be sure on that one and third party presentations may not be correct in their assessment it's installment (or the bureaus for that matter, hard to say talking algorithm).
EX / TU / EQ don't implement the same algorithm unfortunately; their datasets are different, and so the algorithm is different... don't read too much in EX always being lower, I have similar experience with EQ's hating me, and that file was unarguably better than either EX or TU before my tax liens started disappearing, and is clearly better than TU now.
FICO 9 attempts to address this as lenders complained too, but FICO 8 and earlier still have a design goal of being +/- 30 points within each other, so there will be some variance and it's not worth worrying about. Just optimize each file as much as you can, as a pretty report will result in a pretty score regardless of algorithm chosen.