First I need to know what it is, so doing research online to figure out what the latest in fico is.

* Each credit bureau does their own FICO score and yours can be different between the three . If you get your score from somewhere else, it may an “educated guess” score that doesn’t represent an actual score.

* There’s a new “VantageScores” system that’s a joint venture between the three credit bureaus that has a different range scale and etc, started 2 years ago. Not sure how much this is used yet.

Got all that from this site which was pretty descriptive for an overview of the scoring system and what the latest is: Your credit score: how it all adds up

4 steps to better credit – basic stuff that is exactly what I’m doing now. What I’m after here is more about what I can do to raise the score which is Steps #2 and #3 but this is at myFico.com and the page promises that I can find all this elsewhere on the site.

Argh! Apparently not every credit bureau that sells you your score sells the actual one!! That can’t be legal!!

The score you bought from TransUnion is their consumer version of your credit score, but it’s not your FICO score. Many different websites sell credit scores to consumers, but only myFICO.com and Equifax.com sell actual FICO scores to consumers. In fact, you may be surprised to know just how many different credit scores are sold to consumers – most of which are never used by lenders.

Here’s another good link that is a pdf brochure that really breaks down the components of what affects a FICO score.

It’s a little shocking to me to realize that late payments are 35% of the FICO consideration. Cause it hasn’t been that long ago since I got back on track and current with everything. Ugh. Upside is that age of the late payments is also included. The older the late payment instance, the less of a negative impacton the score.

It’s not that I didn’t know before that late payments affected the score but I didn’t realize just how important they are.

So far it seems that keeping the refinancing of my auto loan open will be a positive effect. It’ll only take $75 to pay it off and close the acct but looks like it’ll count as an installation loan that has very good payment history & current balance to original balance ratio.

Equifax has a 3-in-1 monitoring service for $14.95/mo that looks worth while.

I ended up buying the “Complete Credit” pkg from myFico.com for $38 (it’s $50 but used MW01 for 20% off). It’ll give me complete credit reports from all three bureaus plus current FICOs from each as well.

YAY!! I was expecting to see numbers in a different 100s bracket but I’m one whole level above!

And the best recommendation they have for me in the score simulator is to pay off 90-100% of my debt in the next 24 months.

Which I’m already on track to do.

Nicole just reminded me that while I could focus on starting to save for possibly finally buying a house one day (downpayment), that aside from keeping the ER fund, best to just pay off the debts asap because of the interest… which is an excellent point since even with getting out from the interest rape on my auto loan, the other little debts (all under $2k) are around 20%.

I have noticed the interest rates go down on some of them which is good.

The forums on MyFico.com are also very informative… in particular this thread about sending PFD letters to help get bad things off your account. Looks like for the most part I can only hope to send GW (goodwill) letters to try and knock off some of the negative things but there’s one place that a PFD is called for. a PFD letter essentially offers to pay the amount or part of without admitting debt ownership or liabilty in exchange for complete removal from the credit reports.

**wrote this last night but was too lazy to look up the right tags.

So I’ve learned a lot from the MyFico.com forums (just bookmark this for deciphering acronyms). I also really recommend the site All About the Benjamins, in particular this pag: Breakdown of the credit report. I’ve identified what I need to do. Now just need to do them!

* write two GW letters to the two creditors who have reported late payments

* write a PFD for another.

* Leave the auto loan open in prepaid status til it ends. Then make final payment and close it. Doing this will add an extra 2 years of this being on my credit report and being counted in a positive fashion in multiple ways.

* Focus on reducing revolving debt asap (over installment debt).