@I_SUFFER_FROM_FICO_ENVY wrote:So, when you open a new account (e.g., credit card), a consumer gets "dinged" three ways:
1) Hard Pull (which affects your FICO score for 12 months);
2) AAoA decreases b/c there is another tradeline on your credit report (which decreases your FICO) - though, YMMV depending on how thick and old your accounts are;
3) FICO calculates this new acount as "new account" for up to 23 months (or, until it turns 24 months)
Am I correct? These are the three dings?
Sounds about right but 3rd one is somewhat up for debate: I've yet to see someone garden for 2 straight years that wasn't already there when they found the forum... and tracked scores that closely over that time.
I do know I don't get #3 personally but my file has always had "new acounts" by that definition on it. Typically when I open up a new account, I either get:
1) an inquiry, which is graded on a step function and might be no penalty as a result... though recent wonkiness I went from 0 to 1 inquiry on Beacon 5 and my score didn't budge... not sure what that was about.
2) AAOA, if you cross an AAOA boundary, there's likely a ding: we don't know where the AAOA boundaries though other than the most common one which is the 2 year mark. I sort of got lucky with my last spree, I recently went over the 2 year AAOA mark, and I've added 4 more accounts... as each one reports I'm getting closer and closer to the line, but it's going to be a bit tricky to diagnose because FICO '08 appears to have more graded functions for number of accounts reporting balances, and I really should've kept that number precise to try to isolate the AAOA change.
Oh well, bad data analysis, going to be a 4ish point margin of error but given that everyone's score is effectively individual, it's probably still a useful datapoint.
