I have a credit card company that does not report the limit or available credit to credit bureaus. They only show the balance. How does that compute when scoces are determined? I understand that percentage of available credit used is important in scoring.
Hmm.. My Capitol One accounts did that. I think the high credit is used in place of the limit in that case. So if you have a 5K limit and the highest balance that has been reported to the credit bureaus is 3K, that will be used the limit for the purpose of FICO calculation. I'm not 100% sure on this..anyone else have any comments?
Thanks Eric. The card I am referring to is CCB. It doesn't even show the highest balance. I beleive it shows 0 as the limit or high balance.
That is odd. I have a CCB account, and it shows up there. Two points: 1. It takes 45 days for the info to post. The are amazingly slow. 2. It takes a while for credit limit increases to show up. I have actually called the credit bureaus and asked them to investigate in order to get the right limits on there.
Citibank did this to me as well, so I called Fair Isaac. I actually got a bright and helpful guy who seemed to know what he was talking about. He said that it could help or hurt. According to him, when a credit limit is N/A, then the FICO mechanism disregards the entire trade line for percentage-of-credit-used calculations. This would be helpful to you IF you were actually at a high percentage used. That is to say, it's better tho have that trade line disregarded rather than to be actually computed at a, say, 90% utilization. Conversely, if you are at, say, 15% used, then that trade line would probably be helpful to your score, so it's being disregarded might not be good for you score. This agent said that this practice of not reporting credit limits is becoming increasingly common, and that there were discussions going on at Fair Isaac to perhaps tweak the FICO models in order to acknowledge this. As an aside, this appears to me to be an aboslute, clear, unadultrated, and incontrovertible violation of the FCRA's very specific stipulation that it is the OBLIGATION of a creditor to report COMPLETE and ACCURATE information on a debtor. Leaving out the limit information is neither complete NOR is it accurate. This steams me to no freakin' end.
According to my Qspace report, which is a middle ground between consumer and creditor versions of the credit report, my Cap One with N/A credit limit is used for the credit in use calculation.
Eric...are you able to figure out how it is used? Is the "N/A" converted to "0"? IF so, that is a big problem, as division by zero is undefined ("balance divided by limit" ), mathmatecally. In that case, the answer would have no meaning whatsoever. Or perhaps it would assume that the account is "closed"? Perhaps the limit is transparently converted to the same value as your "current balance", thus yielding, at all times a 100% credit line utilization? At any rate, unless such a trade line is disregarded (on these calculations), then a serious distortion is introduced into the FICO scoring mechanism. That is why I did believe the Fair Isaac rep. I simply cannot comprehend either of the two possibilities above. But, then again, it really wouldn't surprise me.
Eric -oops Sorry, I just read a prior response from you that mentions that you thought the "current balance" was used in place of the "credit limit".
