Funny, but BAD for your FICO scores: Retailers in trouble
Yahoo Finance:
Get Ready for Mass Retail Closings
About 220,000 stores may close this year in America, says our guest, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates. As more Americans save and spend less, it’s clear there’s too much retail space. Just visit Web site deadmalls.com and track retail’s growing body count. And luxury retailers? They’re on “life support,” Davidowitz says.
Among the brandname stores Davidowitz says are in trouble:
* Nordstrom
* Neiman Marcus
* Tiffany
* Jeweler Zale Corp.
* Saks
* J.C. Penney
* Sears
...
I read some of the comments and found this one particularly funny:
I’m almost looking forward to this. Maybe my wife will finally stop buying all that crap we don’t need.
Yup.
But on second thought, these are the accounts that really help FICO scores. Of course they will CONTINUE to add to FICO scores due to the AGE, but once the account is closed, they obviously won’t be helping your B/L ratio with the ZERO limit and your score may go down because the account is no longer open.
Closed accounts will be deleted.
The CRAs claim that they’ll report positive accounts for 10 years after an account was closed, but I’ve seen MANY closed accounts deleted much sooner.
How many of you are old enough to have had a Montgomery Wards account? It long ago disappeared from my credit reports.
Unlike with credit cards, these store charge cards are not usually taken over by another store.
I’m more bearish than ever on credit reporting and scoring and I’m hoping that if enough people remove themselves from the system and stop buying credit reports, the credit bureaus will go out of business just like the retailers.
But I’m also fully aware that there still are people trying hard to get a refi and they need those scores to qualify.
So here’s my FICO scoring tip of the day:
If you haven’t used your store cards in a while, the GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE is the time to get some deals and use the store charge card.
A more recent DLA should help to have the account reported longer and you can even carry a balance to artificially prolong the “life” of the account. How it effects your CURRENT FICO scores depends on WHAT ELSE is on your credit reports.
Whether you should bother is a different story.
Posted by Christine on 02/22/2009 at 01:58 AM
2003 Suit (appealed, Experian filed credit reports on PACER) • Fair Isaac - credit scoring fraudware • (0) Comments • Permalink
