Youngest age where 850 has been achieved?

[Anonymous]

I got to thinking about this when posting in Subexistence's current thread regarding him striving for 800 by the age of 20. 

What about 850?  I recall reading a thread on here last year where it was stated that very few people have achieved an 850 score under the age of 40.  It makes sense, of course, as I believe in order to achieve an 850 you need to possess an AoOA of around 15-17 years.  That would put the majority in their mid 30's at least and of course all other slices of the FICO pie would need to be looking stellar. 

Just curious from MF members who the youngest have been to register an 850.  I'm also assuming a straight up profile with no AU accounts factored in here, just to be clear.

[Thomas_Thumb]

Tacpoly and/or IV may have an under 40 data point at 850. Not sure how old Inverse was when he briefly hit 850 after tax liens were removed. His AAoA was just over 8 years and AoOA was 18 to 19 years if I recall correctly.

My guess is minimum AoOA required is in the 12 to 15 year range with AAoA minimum of 7.5 years.

When I was around 40 yo Fico 98 was the model and 850 scores were not real world

[Anonymous]

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@Thomas_Thumb

My guess is minimum AoOA required is in the 12 to 15 year range with AAoA minimum of 7.5 years.

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Interesting, as I thought AoOA would have to be 15-17 years at least.  If it could be accomplished with a 12 year AoOA, that would mean someone in their young 30's could nab an 850 score.

To me, AoOA seems to be the biggest constraint here.

I'd like to hear from anyone that did achieve an 850 at under 40 years of age.  It would be good to know your data points, especially those related to the age of accounts factors.

[iv]

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

Tacpoly and/or IV may have an under 40 data point at 850.

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Yup, I do.  (You keeping dossiers on us now? )

The earliest FICO 8 850 I have in my records is from just after turning 36.

(Which wasn't all that long after FICO 8 became possible to get easily as a consumer, but I also have an 840 recorded from age 35. Both from EX.)

That was with a card opened at age 18 as the oldest open account, multiple mortgage lines reporting, a car loan reporting, AAoA well over 8 years...

Since then, I've been far more credit-active than usual, with two new mortgage lines, several new car loans (one of which is still less than a year old), and a couple of new cards... but bounced back to 850 again quickly. Unsurprisingly, the thicker/older the file is, the easier that gets.

Worth noting, though, that FICO 8 Classic is the only FICO model I've ever pinned - I've never hit the (real-world) EQ5/TU4/EX2 limits (only have seen 809/799/815 as personal maximums), nor hit FICO 9 850s (only 845), nor 900s on any FICO 8/9 industry model (only 887)...

[Anonymous]

WoW, that is impressive.

Any body know the oldest age for hitting 850? I'm pretty sure I can beat that. 

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@iv wrote:

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

Tacpoly and/or IV may have an under 40 data point at 850.

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Yup, I do.  (You keeping dossiers on us now? )

The earliest FICO 8 850 I have in my records is from just after turning 36.

(Which wasn't all that long after FICO 8 became possible to get easily as a consumer, but I also have an 840 recorded from age 35. Both from EX.)

That was with a card opened at age 18 as the oldest open account, multiple mortgage lines reporting, a car loan reporting, AAoA well over 8 years...

Since then, I've been far more credit-active than usual, with two new mortgage lines, several new car loans (one of which is still less than a year old), and a couple of new cards... but bounced back to 850 again quickly. Unsurprisingly, the thicker/older the file is, the easier that gets.

Worth noting, though, that FICO 8 Classic is the only FICO model I've ever pinned - I've never hit the (real-world) EQ5/TU4/EX2 limits (only have seen 809/799/815 as personal maximums), nor hit FICO 9 850s (only 845), nor 900s on any FICO 8/9 industry model (only 887)...

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[Anonymous]

Thanks for responding, iv. 

If you got your first CC at age 18 and at age 36 saw your first 850, that would have put your AoOA at 17-18 years.  I know that an 850 can be achieved with 7.5 years AAoA, so you definitely had that covered for at least a year.  Was your utilization in an ideal place (AZEO) at the time you hit your 850?  Do you know roughly where your installment loan utilization sat, as it sounds like you had multiple loans going on.  I ask these questions because if those factors weren't ideal, it's possible I suppose if you were leaving points on the table that your 850 could have come even a little sooner. 

[iv]

I wasn't going out of my way to micro-manage/optimize things... and AZEO wasn't a recognized maximization strategy back then yet, anyway.

Cards would have been very low util, but reporting "naturally", total non-mortgage installment was in the 60%-70% range, total mortgage installment was in the 20%-30% range, total mortgage+non-mortage installment was just over 30%.

So, generally speaking, "good" but not "optimized". Could applying today's well-known optimization tweaks have squeezed in a few more points slightly earlier? Most likely, yes.

I strongly suspect that someone specifically aiming for FICO 8 850 as their goal could hit it before age 30, though.

(But I'm not sure why they would do that... as focusing on that could get in the way of making better financial choices along the way...)

[Anonymous]

I'm not convinced that someone under age 30 with an AoOA of ~11 years could hit 850, simply based on that one factor alone.  Even if everything else were 100% optimized, I would think AoOA would be the constraint here. 

I guess a spinoff question for this thread would be what is the lowest AoOA someone has had while possessing an 850 score.  The other factors as you mentioned above are more tweaking and for buffering in many cases, where there must be an AoOA threshold that's required (the way 7.5 years is believed to be required AAoA wise).

[iv]

I haven't seen any convincing proof that an AoOA breakpoint actually exists somewhere in the double-digits, beyond 8-10 years.  Sure, there might be one... but that's one of the more difficult things to clearly isolate. (Perhaps someone with a very old, closed account about to hit the dropoff point, and all other accounts only 8-10 years old could narrow that down?)

Regardless, there are at least two ways I can think of for someone to hit a higher AoOA before age 30:

• Open a joint account with a parent at 13-14 (yes, this can still happen...)
• Become an AU on an older spouse's account (spouse + same address to likely "count", and 5-year age gap to get a 15+ year AoOA)

And there are likely other ways (like a current 20-something who took advantage of how Amex used to backdate).

So, I'll say that I'm quite sure that someone obsessed with dedicated to hitting 850 before age 30 certainly could.

Is it worth it? No, of course not.

"Normal" credit use could easily get the same person comfortably into the 800s, without having to financially contort themselves to hit a meaningless goal.

[Anonymous]

Yeah no doubt with AU accounts or a joint account AoOA could be artificially inflated.  That's why in the original post I referenced a straight up profile without any such accounts that could impact the age of accounts factors.

I'd like to hear from those that have hit 850 what their AoOA was at the time.  I don't think I've ever heard of one below 15 years.  That's not to say that there isn't one out there, but I do think finding an 850 with a 10 year AoOA or less is nearly impossible.  Hopefully we get some data points here.

As a sort of spinoff conversation here, it's worth noting the rapidly diminishing returns with respect to top-notch FICO scores.  For example, someone with < 1 year of credit history can hit a 750 score.  Someone with < 2 years of credit history can hit an 800 score.  So, say that's another year of history (or so) to grab the ~50 points to go from 750 to 800.  Then, from 2 years of credit history one is looking at essentially another decade, maybe 13 years in order to get those next/final 50 points to arrive at 850.