Time it takes for companies to report info...

[Anonymous]

Hi!  About 6 weeks ago we paid our credit card down by 1/3, and paid in full our finance company loan.  Our only other debts are 2 car loans and 1 mortgage.  Our score has not changed.  Does anyone know what's the norm on how often companies report?  Does anyone know about how much it should go up?  Our Trans Unions are 670 and 668.  Thanks!! 

[Anonymous]

Hi, Seepa, and welcome to the FICO Forums!

Creditors generally report to the CRAs once a month.  After they report, it could take a few to several days for the CRAs to update your reports with the new information.

It's really not possible to say how many points you'll get for making these payments without knowing more about the accounts.  What are their credit limits and balances now (after the payments), and what were they before?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the welcome!  I used myFICO heavily in 2004 before we bought our house, and haven't been on the site since then.  The credit card balance was almost $2K and we paid $650.  The finance company loan balance was $5K.  We paid it in full. 

We're not looking at buying anything anytime soon, but it would be nice if our scores went up!

[Anonymous]

And what is the credit limit on the card?  This is important to determine your before and after utilization.  Most of whatever score change you see when paying down a credit card is due to the change in this number, so it's important information to have in order to guesstimate the effect.

[haulingthescoreup]

Just because we all need a grin every now and then, here is TheNewWorldMan's take on this:

Remember that credit bureaus use different methods to receive and process good versus bad credit information.

Information that would negatively affect your credit rating--like a late pay or charge-off--is instantly beamed from the creditor to the agency via Department of Defense 256-megabit fiber optic lines and written to their servers in 8.6 milliseconds.

Information that would positively affect your credit rating is scribed onto scrolls in special ink by Gregorian monks, which are then painstakingly illuminated. The Credit Scrolls are then placed onto camel caravans which wind their way to the credit bureau headquarters by way of Marrakesh, Dubai, and Tripoli. Once the caravan reaches Equifax, Experian or TransUnion, the scrolls are then laid out in the sun for a week so that the special ink can be read. (Note that the weather around the credit bureau headquarters is notoriously gloomy, like FICO itself, so finding seven consecutive days of sunshine can be quite an ordeal in and of itself.) Only then can the information finally be encoded into your credit files.

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&message.id=1658&query.id=173924...

Message Edited by haulingthescoreup on 04-06-2008 07:24 AM