Reported today on The New York Times For the full article visit:
Your Credit Score May Soon Change. Here's Why.FICO is tweaking its all-important formula. Scores will rise for about 40 million people and drop for another 40 million.Your credit score - that all-important passport within the financial world - may be about to change. And it won't necessarily be because of anything you did or didn't do.The Fair Isaac Corporation, the company that creates the widely used three-digit FICO score, is tweaking its formula. Consumers in good financial standing should see their scores bounce a bit higher. But millions of people already in financial distress may experience a fall - meaning they'll have more trouble getting loans or will pay more for them.Lenders use FICO scores to judge how likely you are to make timely payments on your loans. But they're also used in lots of other ways, and can influence how much you pay for car insurance to whether you'll qualify to rent a new apartment.The changes, reported on Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, don't alter the main ingredients of your score, but they do take a more finely tuned view of certain financial behaviors that indicate signs of financial weakness.For example, consumers who consolidate their credit card debt into a personal loan and then run up the balance on their cards again will be judged more severely."The new scores reflect nuanced changes in consumer credit trends that we observed from our analysis of millions of credit files," said Dave Shellenberger, vice president of product management at FICO, whose scores generally range from 300 to 850 (the higher, the better).Here's what you need to know about the new credit scoring system.Why change scores now?FICO adjusts its scores every few years, drawing on consumer behavior and patterns that emerge from the vast trove of data it
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