Available Credit

[Johnworker1]

Diligently working on my credit profile and scores to gain my (long lost) credit worthiness. I am a member of Credit Wise and Credit Karma. I notice today on Credit Wise that they use available credit as a criteria in the Vantage 3.0 scoring. It shows my available credit of $4,885 which it rates as AVERAGE (my lowest rating) and I am wondering does anyone know what available credit range could be considered EXCELLENT (their highest rating). I have had 3 credit cards with 2K, 2.5K and 400 credit limits (4900 total) since 10/23 but just got a Chase Freedom Unlimited credit card with a 9k credit limit so my new available credit should be 13.9K.

[justbroke]

I think it weighs available credit versus credit in use. In other words, cumulative utilization across all cards. So you take the sum of all credit limits and then divide it by the sum of all balances to come out with an "overall" utilization. FICO and Vantage both look at the individual card, and the cards as a whole.

But I'd never care about Vantage. Vantage hates balances. It's as simple as that. I have had a 740 FICO at the same time I had a 650 Vantage. It's a useless score and is very sensitive to balances. (Insurance scores are also sensitive to available credit... because they want you to charge it and not file a claim.)

[shipo]

To underscore what justbroke wrote, dismiss anything you see on Credit Wise and Credit Karma, they are what are called FAKO scores (i.e. Vantage 3.0) and are ignored by the credit industry; the only scores which are relevant are the FICO scores which you will not get from those two sources.

As for what qualifies as "Very Good" or "Excellent", there are many-MANY factors, and oddly enough, your available credit is basically a non-factor when scoring; here is a summary of how your scores are calculated (just a summary, there is a lot of black art in each of the following categories):

• 35% impact: Payment History
  • 30+ day late payments
  • 60+ day late payments
  • Negative public records like bankruptcies and judgements
  • Collections
  • Time since most recent late payment
  • Percentage of accounts "always" paid as agreed
  • 30+ day late payments in the last 12-months
  • 30+ day late payments older than 12-months
• 30% impact: Amount of Debt
  • Accounts with balances
  • Total Balance on Revolving and Open-Ended Accounts
  • Revolving Utilization
• 15% impact: Length of Credit History
  • Average Age of Accounts (in years and months)
  • Age of Oldest Account (in years and months)
• 10% impact: Amount of New Credit
  • Number of Recent Inquiries (aka. Hard-Pulls or just HPs)
  • Age of Most Recently Opened Account (in years and months)
• 10% impact: Credit Mix
  • Number of Revolving Accounts
  • Number of Installment Loans, including Auto Loans and Mortgages
  • Bank-Issued Credit Card Accounts (note, not the same as "revolving" store cards)

[Johnworker1]

I think it weighs available credit versus credit in use. In other words, cumulative utilization across all cards. So you take the sum of all credit limits and then divide it by the sum of all balances to come out with an "overall" utilization. FICO and Vantage both look at the individual card, and the cards as a whole.

But I'd never care about Vantage. Vantage hates balances. It's as simple as that. I have had a 740 FICO at the same time I had a 650 Vantage. It's a useless score and is very sensitive to balances. (Insurance scores are also sensitive to available credit... because they want you to charge it and not file a claim.)

Great points about Vantage metrics. Where can I get the actual FICO scores myself. Is the score that Experian provides for free and TransUnion for 99 cents a FICO score?

[justbroke]

I think Experian provides a true FICO score. If you can't get a true FICO from your bank or lender, then MyFICO is the only place to get them all. By all, I mean all 27+ variations of FICO.

[shipo]

There is one other source, credit.com has a package called ExtraCredit; it provides virtually the same data as the myFICO Premier package, but costs about $15 less per month.

[noonway]

I signed up for ExtraCredit yesterday and trialed the site and created an account here just to say that their site is almost unusable. Spend the extra money on MyFICO to save yourself a bunch of time and headache.