Yesterday I received a reminder email from Credit Karma. It had been a while since I had updated my score. So I went ahead and did that and their estimate of my score rose to 775. That was nice.
One thing which hurts my score is my length of accounts. They say my oldest account is 105 months, and my average age is 90 months. When I divorced, I closed all of my joint credit accounts. Two of my very oldest individual accounts were Mervyn's (1987) and Gottschalk's (1992). Since both retailers have declared bankruptcy in the past couple of years, those accounts are now closed.
The other thing which hurts my score is they insist I have a credit utilization ratio of 30%. This is not true, I have available credit of 60k or so. However, some of my cards don't report a limit, so they assume my limit is equal to the highest balance ever on the card.
Even with those little dings, I don't have any trouble obtaining credit when I want it.
Tomorrow is payday. I have just counted the contents of my wallet, and I see that I have $6.37 which will go to the bank to be swept into my mortgage.
Someday, all of these little chips should add up.
Credit Karma, Mortgage Chip
September 14th, 2011 at 02:59 pm