Author: Christine

1) FICO score “ingredients.”

According to Fair Isaac:

• Payment history
• Amounts owed
• Length of credit
• New Credit
• Types of credit

Please DO study this Fair Isaac page, it’s one of the few pages with excellent and ACCURATE information.

This is the data referred to at the top of the myFICO reports as FICO score “ingredients.”

Note that “types of credit” is NOT listed on the reports.  That’s probably because the rating is rather unscientific or in other words, they’d get a lot of complaints about incorrect ratings.

I don’t pay much attention to this section until I’m ready to draft disputes and to make recommendations for new accounts, etc.

When the length of credit (account history) is NOT a score factor, this rating gives me a good idea how the FICO software rates the report.  And since OLD accounts are often reported only on one or two reports, there may be a big difference  between reports.

2) The FICO score factors

Here are the score factors as I posted them for my client:

Trans Union

Top Negative Factors

You have a collection on your credit report.

Number of collections on your credit report: 4 Collections

You have few accounts that are in good standing.

Number of your accounts currently paid as agreed 0 account

— the student loans are NOT rated

You have a short credit history

Your oldest account was 9 Months ago.
Average age of your accounts 9 Months ago

— the student loans still count, although unrated

There is no recent activity on your revolving accounts.

Your credit report shows no open revolving accounts [?] or it does not report recent information (such as balance or credit limit) about any of your revolving accounts. Your FICO score evaluates your mix of credit cards, installment loans and mortgages. People who demonstrate responsible use of different types of credit are generally less risky to lenders.

What’s helping your FICO score

You have no missed payments on your credit accounts.

Number of your accounts with a missed payment: 0

It’s a lot of work to copy/paste and format the score factors from the reports, the kind of task perfect for software.  But you can’t improve credit scores without being able to QUICKLY review the score factors.

For followup reviews, I copy the initial factors and then update with the new factors.  Each score has its own descriptive topic:

7/13/08 — TU — 569

I annotate the topic with important changes or problems.
On this report we only have two accounts, both unrated student loans.  We also have 4 collections and it is a bit odd to see that the payment history is “very good” and the positive factor:

“Number of your accounts with a missed payment: 0 accounts.”

That’s why it’s SOMETIMES so important that collections are NOT incorrectly reported as tradelines.

The 8/8/08 TU myFICO score of 661 (still with 4 collections) documents that AU accounts are NOT entirely ignored in the new FICO 08 TU scoring formula.

But first I’ll post the unrated student loans in the next entry.

I changed my mind about posting on the TU “bk or unrated” accounts when I looked at the report.

Since few credit repairers have seen a myFICO report, I decided to start with going through the myFICO report and explaining what to IGNORE.

It’s a HUGE problem that the myFICO credit reports are full of bla bla bla …

Here’s the screenshot of the first part of a Trans Union myFICO report with many meaningless words:

  As you can see, MOST of the text should be ignored: