@Anonymous wrote:
I wonder how many creditors know how this ridiculous system works. FICO is supposed to be an indicator of an individuals creditworthiness yet, according to FICO, you are less creidtworthy one day due to no changes? Makes alot of sense to any rational person???
Changed buckets, let see, one day I have a given score, my credit report ages and moves me to a new bucket, all of a sudden I have a lower score. I still have the same payment history, same balances, same everything yet I am all of a sudden a higher risk borrower because I have had my good credit for a longer amount of time? This is truly silly. How can anyone take such a system seriously?
It can be pretty maddening when it happens, but there are score buckets to allow consumers to be compared to other consumers with similar characteristics. Someone with a collection, 5 lates, and a charge-off would be mired at 364 for decades if they were compared directly with 60-year-olds with 40 years of immaculate credit.
When one of the bucket-defining factors falls off or is removed, or when your credit history hits a new age range, you are now being compared with a different group of people, who might have better credit than you. So you don't look so hot for a while. But as time passes (and generally this happens within a month or two of the re-assignment, your profile comes closer to matching others in your new group, and your scores increase, and they have the potential to rise higher than they did in your previous group.
I think of kids who play soccer. You start out in AYSO or rec league clumping around playing blob ball, stopping to look at planes go over, and building sand castles in goal. You keep forgetting that the direction of play changes at the half, and if you've got a good leg, you probably even manage to score an own goal by shooting into the wrong net. But you start catching on, and getting more skillful, and liking it. Eventually you find that your coach is playing you more quarters than the others. A mom or dad on the sidelines sees you play, and they think that you and their own kid and 10 or 12 others are pretty good, and really ought to move from AYSO to club soccer.
So you buy the fancy unis, and you get a coach who actually understands the game, and you head out to your first game, and your team gets slaughtered. Keep on playing, keep on getting better, and you get recruited by a club team that's actually good.
Pay another couple hundred bucks for new unis, meet your new coach who has an Accent, start going to practice, and find yourself on the bench for the first several games. Stick with it, get better, survive the first spring's cuts, see the new players come in and realize that in fact, you're better than they.
Keep playing and getting better, your team registers in Div 1, you go to state a couple of times and some good invitational tournaments, and one day you get an e-mail full of misspellings and bad grammar with an address ending in .edu from a coach who asks if you've ever thought about playing at the college level. And do you really think that you'll get a lot of minutes as a freshman?
Not many things in life have smooth rising curves. There are generally more bumps and plateaus, with occasional dips. Credit is one of those things.
* Credit is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. * Who's the boss --you or your credit?
FICO's: EQ 781 - TU 793 - EX 779 (from PSECU) - Done credit hunting; having fun with credit gardening. - EQ 590 on 5/14/2007
