From the monthly archives:

February 2009

February 25, 2009

There is no FICO score in my credit report!

Strange as it may seem, the score should not be there. This is the biggest disappointment about every credit report, no matter how accurate it is there is no indication of the actual credit score (the FICO score) in it. The report you get reflects your credit activities, it does not give you the magic [...]

February 25, 2009

I authorized my partner to use my card in order to improve her credit score so that we can have a better mortgage later when we are ready to buy a home, but the information on the card usage does not even show on her credit report.

It is a recent change: the authorized user information is not taken into account by the three credit score bureaus any more, so no authorized user can build any score this way. Fair Isaac Corporation’s newest FICO scoring model ignores authorized user accounts when calculating Classic FICO credit risk scores. As it is stated on [...]

February 25, 2009

My report is full of delinquent mortgage payments. Well, I admit I’ve skipped a payment once, but how did it turn into so many?

It is a snowball effect. For example, you skip a payment in May. Delinquency. Then you pay your regular monthly amount in June. However, the system of amortizing a mortgage works in such a way that your June amount is used to pay off the May debt, but then there is no money left for [...]

February 25, 2009

I paid my old delinquency expecting to improve my credit score, but the score dropped instead!

Delinquency stays on the record for 7 years, but its negative power declines with time. Its power declines in any case, but the 7-year countdown for removing it from the record may not start until the delinquency is paid. If your delinquency was old, its significance had been weakened with time. When you paid it, [...]

February 16, 2009

Credit Score

These two painful words and three painful digits… Unfair is another word that you hear a lot next to them. Why unfair? Why do many people feel that their credit score is rather random than calculated according to some consistent rule and/or some common sense? Let’s take a closer look. The Fair Isaac Corporation developed [...]