how fico scoring keeps the caste system alive and well in america.....

[Anonymous]

6 and 1/2 years of paying every account on time....

6 and 1/2 years and opened only 4 credit card accounts and 1 auto loan....

6 and 1/2 years and rehabilitated student loans, removing all negative references....

6 and 1/2 years and all 4 revolving accounts are at less than 20% utilization....

6 and 1/2 years of scrimping, saving, monitoring my credit, being embarrassed, buying nothing extravagant....

6 and 1/2 years to get from the mid/high 400's to a lousy 657 experian, 644 equifax, and 641 transunion....

6 and 1/2 years of trying to recover from being a working class kid who made the mistake of spending 7 years getting an upper-class education, without mommy and daddy's pocketbook in tow....

today i get an equifax credit alert stating that my score has dropped 54 points to 590....

my equifax report had not changed one iota...i bought a new report to check....

the alert explained that i have possibly moved to a new credit "class," or that i have been seeking too much new credit....

the only new account that i sought in the past 6 months was a circuit city credit card which was denied...

talk about frustrating nonsense!  i have busted my tail to be financially responsible for nearly 7 years, and now sit here 6 months away from every single negative item being wiped away from my credit reports and i get a 54 point drop because i either: 1) applied for some chicken crap credit card to buy my daughter a laptop for school (which i then bought with cash...the only reason i applied for the card was i thought a new account might help my credit), or 2) i have moved from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond.  okay my friend, you are pretty high on the pond scum list, so you get a 644, but now that you have moved into the realm of simple losers, we must knock your ass back down to a 590.  what a dirty, filthy, elitist scam.  be advised, those of you who were born to working-class roots, those of you who will have to struggle, borrow, beg and steal to try to rise above the status to which you were born:  the caste system is alive and well in america! (to be continued)

[Anonymous]

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dog wrote:

6 and 1/2 years of paying every account on time....

6 and 1/2 years and opened only 4 credit card accounts and 1 auto loan....

6 and 1/2 years and rehabilitated student loans, removing all negative references....

6 and 1/2 years and all 4 revolving accounts are at less than 20% utilization....

6 and 1/2 years of scrimping, saving, monitoring my credit, being embarrassed, buying nothing extravagant....

6 and 1/2 years to get from the mid/high 400's to a lousy 657 experian, 644 equifax, and 641 transunion....

6 and 1/2 years of trying to recover from being a working class kid who made the mistake of spending 7 years getting an upper-class education, without mommy and daddy's pocketbook in tow....

today i get an equifax credit alert stating that my score has dropped 54 points to 590....

my equifax report had not changed one iota...i bought a new report to check....

the alert explained that i have possibly moved to a new credit "class," or that i have been seeking too much new credit....

the only new account that i sought in the past 6 months was a circuit city credit card which was denied...

talk about frustrating nonsense!  i have busted my tail to be financially responsible for nearly 7 years, and now sit here 6 months away from every single negative item being wiped away from my credit reports and i get a 54 point drop because i either: 1) applied for some chicken crap credit card to buy my daughter a laptop for school (which i then bought with cash...the only reason i applied for the card was i thought a new account might help my credit), or 2) i have moved from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond.  okay my friend, you are pretty high on the pond scum list, so you get a 644, but now that you have moved into the realm of simple losers, we must knock your ass back down to a 590.  what a dirty, filthy, elitist scam.  be advised, those of you who were born to working-class roots, those of you who will have to struggle, borrow, beg and steal to try to rise above the status to which you were born:  the caste system is alive and well in america! (to be continued)

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It sounds like the pond problem.  But if your baddies are going to drop in six months, you should see a rise or bounce back in your score.  And the 7-year mark may be (although I have no authority on or evidence for this timing) a turning point to turn you into a bigger fish in your new pond.  Hang in there!

[girlie]

i am so sorry to hear this.  i cannot believe that after 6 1/2 years, you scores has only increased to the 600's. 

i am a little concerned because i've heard talk about "credit buckets" in here and I am wondering where the cutoffs are.  my scores are now 651, 658, 665.  I am wondering if I am no in a higher bucket, meaning a small fish in a big pond and am about to become scum again...lol!

Hope not and my scores are rising rapidly, but desparately trying to make it to 680-700 by the end of summer.

Can someone enlighten me about the buckets?

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I wonder if since you were approaching the 7 year mark, a collector mad a change to keep it from dropping off and it was renewed or sold to another collector? That much of a drop should be a specific action. Also did anything good drop off that was holding it 50 points higher. In all cases your score should sky rocket soon if the baddies drop off. Hang in there!

[Anonymous]

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girlie wrote:

i am a little concerned because i've heard talk about "credit buckets" in here and I am wondering where the cutoffs are.  my scores are now 651, 658, 665.  I am wondering if I am no in a higher bucket, meaning a small fish in a big pond and am about to become  scum again...lol!  ...

Can someone enlighten me about the buckets?

Thanks.

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Where the buckets/ponds/categories begin and end is part of the secret, proprietary FICO info.

It's not as simple as dividing people based on scores.  For example, a pond might include people who have 3 or fewer collections which are 5 or more years old, plus at least 2 TLs in good standing.  You'd swim into the pond as soon as your collections aged to 5 years, but if you had only 2 TLs in good standing for a short period of time, you'd be at the bottom of the pond because there are people there whose collections are older, and they have 4 TLs, some of which are over 10 years old.  I am making up all the designators here because we don't know exactly what they are.

Just keep doing all the right stuff and as time goes by, you'll swim into a better pond. It may feel like swimming upstream, but you will rise to the top!

[Anonymous]

thanks for the encouragement, everyone.  i compared my 644 report to my 590 report and there is absolutely no difference whatsoever.  the circuit city inquiry was already on the 644, so i dont think that made the drop.  it appears that the only explanation is the pond thing....but 54 points?!!??

i agree that after 6.5 years, it is amazing that i am only in the low to mid 600's, and now 590 on equifax.  the bad thing is that i am now in the dilemma of whether to pay another 30 bucks to see if experian and transunion did a nose dive too.  i am about sick of throwing money at these people every month or so to give me information about me that they are already making money off of in the first place.

i am hoping that, when the baddies drop off (4 in august, 2 in september, 1 in december and 1 in january), i have a significant jump.  the bad thing about this crap is that i already have a home that is paid for, have a car loan at a fairly decent interest rate (8.75), and make 67k a year (which is not bad for west virginia), so i am not really in desperate need of credit.  i would just  like to get in better shape for a 15 year mortgage to do some rather extensive home remodeling, but this is not a necessity.

i guess at this point, i am leaning towards staying off of myfico until january...if i come back then and still look like a railyard hobo, then i will call it quits with monitoring my credit. 

thanks again for the support.

[MidnightVoice]

Don't worry, after over 5 years I was in the same boat (50 point increase over 5 perfect years). Then I came here, learned more about the system and how to play the game and started playing. I got 50 more points in 5 months. A few tweaks here and there and a drop off next March and I will have another 50 or so points. That will put me in the FICO High Achievers club, with a probable 800 on TU, and I can stop obsessing

[smallfry]

Don't give up dog. Keep paying your bills on time keep the credit card purchases to a minimum and you'll be surprised where your scores are in one year.

[Anonymous]

The irony here (to the OP) is that your "credit conservatism" is what has actually held your score down. If you had gotten six or seven CCs, and kept bugging the CC issuers for CLIs every four months starting in 2005 or so, your FICO would probably be 50 to 75 points higher than it is today. Maybe more.

[MidnightVoice]

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TheNewWorldMan wrote:
The irony here (to the OP) is that your "credit conservatism" is what has actually held your score down. If you had gotten six or seven CCs, and kept bugging the CC issuers for CLIs every four months starting in 2005 or so, your FICO would probably be 50 to 75 points higher than it is today. Maybe more.

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Correct.  I came here, I learned the game, I got credit I didn't need, I learned that utilization is what is reported not what is paid, I got my score up.

Play the game.