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August 04, 2007
A trick to bump up your credit score
Here's a neat trick to repair the hits your FICO score takes when you apply for credit cards. A technique called bumpage, or just "B", takes advantage of the way credit reporting agencies calculate your credit score.
When you subscribe to a credit report service and pull your own credit report, that is noted on your report as a "soft pull". Now if you do enough soft pulls, they will eventually "bump off" off the "hard pulls" since the agencies only keep track of a certain number of total pulls.
Why should you care? Well, hard pulls, which are recorded every time you apply for a credit card or a loan, stay on your credit report for 24 months and can lower your FICO credit score by anywhere from 5 to 20 points. Soft pulls, however, do not affect your score. That means you can bump up your credit score by replacing hard pulls.
From my hard-core investigation (okay, five minutes worth of google searches), it looks like this only works with TransUnion and Equifax reports.
Posted by brian at August 4, 2007 05:30 AM
Comments
Equifax’s Credit Watch cuts off soft pulls before you get to the level needed for bumpage. Bastards!! That's ‘choppage’, so just be awaare.
Posted by: vgn01 at August 4, 2007 10:05 AM
from the wall street journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118652301207790891.html?mod=mktw
Posted by: ayame at August 10, 2007 09:08 AM