Vyger

 "There is a very good technical reason for this phenomenon. The length of your credit history is a factor that goes into the credit score calculation. Since younger individuals will have shorter credit history, they will tend to have a lower credit score all else equal."

Maybe parents should open a 'secured' credit card account for their newborn right away. :)

I wonder how people with their very own domain would score.

It would be interesting if CK would add that one as well - or at least a category for all others than the ones listed so far.

Here on CK I registered with a hotmail account but I do own several domains with email accounts attached as well.

I regulary create email accounts (or an alias) when I have to provide an email address to a new vendor for the first time: today I wanted to get a car insurance quote so I created 'esurancequote @ <my.domain>' and now I am waiting to see what other senders (besides esurance) are going to spam me on that account.

1) they all use their very own formular how they calculate your credit score (think of it like a "cola": COKE here, PEPSI there)

2) not every credit card company and every creditor reports to ALL of the major credit reporting agencies (some of my credit cards show up everywhere but transunion, other credit cards don't show up on experian - hence, even if they were using the same formular they still would show different results due to the different input data

The credit card company usually reports the balance on your monthly statement. If you pay it in full anyways just pay the balance before the closing date so that the statement balance at the end of your billing cycle is close to zero.
If you are lucky one of your credit card companies will voluntarily increase your line of credit which in turn will lower your overall utilization which in return will also help to improve your credit score.
Don't ASK your credit card company to increase your limit - that will DROP your score because it is considered a "HARD" hit on your credit report.
Over several years I've seen two of my credit cards going from around $5K each to $14K each without ever asking for any increase. That healthy $28K available credit line on just those two cards helps keeping my utilization very low.

That is even more true when considering the utilization ratio of your current line of credit.

If I make $200K a year and I am happy with just 2 or 3 credit cards with a total line of credit of lets say $20K I am getting 'punished' because I only have a small number of accounts and I have a high utilization ratio.

Plus, even if I pay the balance off each month it shows the high utilization.

I have started paying my cards BEFORE the monthly cut off day so that they won't show the high utilization any more.

And to argue with the CK moderator: Yes, the metric of responsibility should be independent of how much money I make. However, the amount of total debt should be put into relation with my income (regardless how many - or few - total accounts I have).

I would also argue that a credit score should get a hit if someone with a significant amount of outstanding debt suddenly makes 25% less a year.

My very first credit card was a Bank Of America secured one. It automatically converted to an unsecured card after 24 months. I first started with $400 (which I had in a BOA savings account) and increased it several times to $2000 within those 24 months (yes, I had to have the $2000 in my savings account!). Now, about 8 years later that initially secured credit card (BOA VISA) is a BOA Platinum Visa (unsecured)with a $14,000 line of credit. I never asked BOA to increase the line of credit. They did that automatically (4K, 6K, 8K, 10K and then 14K).