FICO scoring

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 06/15/2010 - 04:52

I'm hoping someone can help me understand my FICO score.

On my recent Equifax report, it says there are three things hurting my FICO score:

1. "You have a public record and a serious delinquency on your credit report."
It goes off the books in 2 months.

2. "You have multiple accounts showing missed payments or derogatory descriptions."

On the helping your FICO score side: You've recently been paying your bills on time. Your most recent late payment happened 2 Years, 8 Months ago. Yea again.

3. "You have a short credit history."

Your oldest account was opened 15 Years, 8 Months ago.
Average age of your accounts 12 Years.

Most FICO High Achievers have an average age of accounts between 6 and 12 years. Why is my 12 year AAoA, which falls within the range of FICO HA AAoA, hurting my FICO score? Why isn't it helping?
Thanks in advance. My Equifax score is 698

is the ones that are 12 years old the deregatory ones? Just curious, I think the fact that you have a short credit history may be affecting your score as well, have you thought about opening a credit card just to build credit history?

Tue, 06/15/2010 - 10:50 Permalink

Hi Elvin,

Having short credit history is not negative, but having a bad credit history is negative. To improve your credit score, you need to remove the negatives from your credit reports. As for the first point, you need to do nothing as these are going to fall off your credit report in two months time.

You are making payments on time, but your credit score isn't improving. This may be because of the negatives on your credit report.

As for the other negatives, it seems that you did not try to remove those during the payments. Now, you can try to remove the negatives by sending goodwill letters to the creditors. Another thing that you can do to improve your credit score is take a secured credit card. This can help you in improving your credit score.

Get the card from such a company who reports to all the three credit bureaus. Use this card to make purchases, and then make on time payments on the card.

Thanks,

Aaron

Tue, 06/15/2010 - 11:16 Permalink