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Re:The careless errors of credit reporting agencies by TeMPOraL on Sunday September 11, 2016 @02:17PM (#12474746)
Given what I hear about US banks, this seems like a most obvious variable to include in computing the credit score. Which leads me to my question - is there an official/exhaustive list of what exactly is considered and how, or is that a banking secret?
Re:The careless errors of credit reporting agencies by superuser2 on Sunday September 11, 2016 @02:26PM (#12474785)
The factors are, in decreasing order of weight:

- Credit card utilization (balance as a percentage of available credit at last statement close)

- On-time payments (you just have to pay the minimum required by the date specified for it to count)

- Derogatory marks (collections, bankruptcies, foreclosures and liens)

- Average age of accounts (this favors older people who have been using credit a long time but not opening a lot of accounts recently)

- Total number of accounts (also rewards a mixture of types - car, student, credit card, mortgage, etc)

- Hard inquiries (very slightly dings your score if you're currently looking for credit, punishes you harder if you're desperately applying to everything you can find because this indicates financial emergency and therefore high risk).

https://www.creditkarma.com/article/credit-score-factors

If you use CreditKarma, it'll explain all this and how the values on your credit report fit in to the averages.

Re:The careless errors of credit reporting agencies by nommm-nommm on Sunday September 11, 2016 @11:30PM (#12477012)
The exact FICO algorithm is proprietary. They do give some information about what it entails.

I am in no way affiliated with freecreditreport.com, it's just a site I find incredibly useful. It's now owned by Experian and it gives you your Experian FICO 8 credit score. They break down each part of your credit score and grade you on each. (A-F)

There's other sites like credit karma that do similar but they use vantage score which is also known as FAKO score and isn't used by lenders but is a good indication of what your FICO score may be.