Have you never pulled your own credit report? You should if you havent.

It is hard to say why. It could be a combination of reasons but things that come to mind are:

- the lien was not secured correctly against your name when you first got your vehicle = the credit line was never reported onto your credit bureau
- human error when assessing your credit the second time around
- were you the primary or secondary on the loan? again, depending on the finance company, human error occurs when registering a lien on the 2nd person

15 years ago is a long time and I'm sure credit buying trends have changed a LOT since then.

It may be easier to explain it to you this way.

Never be late on:
- creditcards
- auto loans
- mortgages
- lines of credit
- bank loans
- any type of leasing, ie// musical instruments from Long Mcquade etc

Things that kind of don't matter as much if you were late paying:
- cell phone / mobility / cable

Hydro is never reported on your credit bureau as a "credit line". The only time I've seen hydro on a bureau is when it's gone to collections status. Any time you start getting collection calls, especially from 3rd party agencies, your debt's already been written off and sold to a 3rd party company to recover the debt and reported as so on your bureau. It will show as a Collection item and drag your Beacon down.

Tips on having a strong credit bureau:

1.) Don't be late paying your credit lines (creditcards, line of credits, auto loans, mortgages etc). As long as you pay the bare minimum prior to the due date, your creditscore will not be affected negatively. So if the minimum payment on your creditcard is $75 dollars, pay that $75 dollars ON TIME

2.) Don't go shopping for credit randomly at multiple places and not follow through
- "Shopping around" drives your credit score down. I see a ton of idiots going to Kingsway Honda, then Richmond Honda, then Burrard Acura applying for credit at multiple places. "Shopping around" is credit seeking, and when you do it too many times in a short period, it reflects very poorly on your creditscore. Each time a creditor pulls your credit, your Beacon score will go down.

The only reason people shop around is usually because one place turned them down, and then they go somewhere else... rinse and repeat.

If you wanna shop around and get a better deal, you NEGOTIATE a deal prior to having your credit pulled.

3.) Use your creditcard, then pay it off. Keeping a balance is ok, but try to keep the balance between 25-50%. Don't let it ride at max. Maxed credit drives your score down

4.) It's better to keep creditcards you don't use open, than to close them off by calling Visa/Mastercard and requesting the credit line closed. Sometimes, credit card companies will misreport the closure, and it ends up looking like a R9 write off. That isn't your fault, again it's human error.

There's more, but I'm kinda busy at work :P

How much does your credit get affected if u miss your credit card payment by a few days? While I don't do it anymore, there have been a handful of times where I simply forgot to pay my credit card bill, or was waiting for pay day. It never happened consistently, but would happen once in a while.
Posted via RS Mobile

^ Great question. Unfortunately I'm not able to put an actual number of how much your beacon score drops each time you miss a payment.

But, what a lot of banks nowadays offer to customers is an auto-minimum payment option onto your creditcards. It links it to your bank account so that when your creditcard payment is due, it will auto deduct the minimum payment out of your account to cover that months payment. It'll help protect you from getting dings against your credit bureau for late payments.

Keep in mind, when creditors review a persons credit, we buy within a guideline and generally there is an acceptable amount of late payment(s) on each credit line per year.

Different lenders will have different guidelines. Mortgage guidelines will probably be more strict vs. Auto lending guidelines etc.

Keep in mind the beacon score is not the end all be all of your credit. It's only one part of what we look at. Having a high beacon score is a good indication that the customer pays well, maintains good standing on their credit lines, etc. It's an indicator, but we don't base your profile just on that score.

Ex.// A person might have a 750 beacon score (which is a great score), but only has one credit card with a $1000 limit, $0 balance, established in July 2012. This person might be looking to purchase a $35,000 vehicle. Does this persons credit support a $35k purchase? No... but they score high, and have perfectly clean credit.

That's where some confusion is with people new to credit...

There are so many people who are either misinformed or completely ignorant as to how credit really works in our society and how much it's needed...

And they go around telling other ignorant people misinformation, and it just spreads.

Some of the things I've heard from my friends...:facepalm:

Thanks for the solid information.

I'm glad I started this thread! It really delivered.
Posted via RS Mobile

Care to share? I had someone tell me once that it is best for your credit to pay off your credit card bill completely every month. He implied that carrying a balance on your credit card has negative effects on credit score.
Posted via RS Mobile

Take it for what it's worth but I am bad when it comes to paying my credit card bill. For a while when I was in between jobs, I lived off of my credit card. I was always paying off the minimum and quite often I was a few days late because I would forget. Well, I still managed to get to get a mortgage from the bank, twice.
It won't kill your credit rating but if you have the money to pay off the credit card, why wouldn't since most bank credit cards are going to be 18% or higher interest.

with financing rates as they are today, your nuts to buy a car outright