The six month rule

[Anonymous]

Canadian recently immigrated, building credit from scratch:

I'm aware that I need six months of credit history to have a score. My oldest card has now reported five months and I'm checking regularly hoping to see that sixth month report. Yay!

Does the rule also apply to other tradelines? My next two cards are at 3, about to be four months, and my last card has not yet reported a single month, and probably wont for another month.

Do these other cards not count until they are each reporting six months? Or is it just AAoA rising linearly from here? What are the next significant dates?

[Anonymous]

no, just for generating a score needs 6 months. everything will be scored once you have the 6 months of history.

[Anonymous]

And I guess it is 6 months per CRA. Looking closely, I see I have 5 months of history with Equifax and Experian, but only 4 months with Transunion -- they are reporting a month later than the other two, consistently. So it'll be a few more days and I'll have a score with Eq/Ex but another month likely before I'll have a score if someone bases it on data from TU.

[jamie123]

Once your first card is 6 months old you will get a score. All your other cards will just start contributing to the score either for the good or bad.

The only important dates after the 6 months are your AAoA (Average Age of Accounts) and age of oldest account. IMHO it is very important to get at least 5 quality credit cards that you will be able to keep open for life as soon as possible. As these 5 credit cards age they will start to stabilize your scores and when they are 10 years old your scores will be rock solid.

You might want to wait until your oldest card turns one year old before apping for any more credit cards. You will have a much better chance of approval with higher CLs if you wait.

You should consider opening a shared secured installment loan with a credit union like Alliant Federal Credit Union now. Get a $500 shared secured loan for a term of 4 to 5 years. This will help thicken your file and give you a few points as long as it remains open.

[Anonymous]

So looking at the Amex site, Experian is now reporting 6 months against my oldest account. Equifax still at 5. TransUnion lagging way back at 4. 

I guess my question is really about myFICO products, I see that the monthly monitoring thing comes with only one full bureau report per year? So basically I should wait until TU is reporting 6 months history before I flip from monitoring via the Amex service to monitoring via myFico?

And then what? I am gardening now, got 4 CC's going for now and I don't expect to see any significant changes to my account other than my score hopefully rising from my tiny AAoA rising over time, and from my hard inq's aging and then eventually falling off.

I'm curious to know what my FICO score is... up until now since I have less than 6 months history I have only been able to get "PLUS" scores and other fako's.

[NRB525]

Yes, you probably want to wait until all the bureaus are saying they have a score for you.

And yes, once you get the one 3-bureau credit file report, if you sign up for the monitoring, you will get regular updates about significant items, and the relevant score changes at each bureau resulting fom those items.