I will agree that suggestion #2 is an important aspect of personal credit management in two respects.
Your individual CC balances compared to your available credit limit on those CCs represents 30% of your FICO scoring. Therefore, paying down your balances ASAP, and/or increasing your available credit limit on each credit card are very important ways to increase scores.
With respect to suggestion #4, that little "loophole" has pretty much been eliminated from score increase criteria. In the last few years that method was used by unethical folks to fraudulently prepare otherwise unqualified people to obtain credit, mainly to buy houses and obtain mortgages.
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June 5, 2007 - (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA) - Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) today announced that it will adjust its FICO scoring formula to ensure the continued reliability and predictive power of FICO scores. This action is intended to protect lenders and FICO scores from abuse of authorized user credit card accounts in order to purposefully misrepresent the applicants' own credit history to lenders and other businesses.
The adjustment removes authorized user accounts from consideration by the scoring model in FICO 08, the newest version of the Classic FICO credit score which Fair Isaac expects to become available to lenders starting in September.
"We will do whatever it takes to protect the reliability and accuracy of FICO credit scores for lenders, and to ensure lenders can continue to use FICO scores with confidence when making their most important customer decisions," said Dr. Mark Greene, CEO of Fair Isaac. "We will continue working with lenders, regulators and others in the credit reporting industry to end deceptive practices that fraudulently misrepresent consumer credit histories for profit."
An authorized user is a person permitted by a credit account holder to use an account, typically a family member who is managing credit for the first time. Used legitimately, authorized user account information has helped both lenders and consumers by enabling lenders to use FICO scores when making credit decisions for consumers who are starting to establish a credit history. Fair Isaac's research indicates that the next version of its FICO scoring formula will deliver increased predictive power without considering authorized user accounts.
Fair Isaac will work closely with lenders to help them implement and benefit from the FICO 08 score as it becomes available. As the company announced previously, lenders will be able to use the new version of FICO scores with minimal changes to their own operating systems. To make lender adoption easier and faster, the new scoring model will retain the same scoring range, score reason codes, minimum scoring criteria, inquiry treatment, and related model parameters as previous versions of the FICO formula.
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