Personal Information Variance

0.5% of your FICO score

This is by far, the most overlooked and underestimated parts of your credit score.  Most people feel that your personal information does not impact your credit score.  They feel this way because the three credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) have stated that, “[Personal] information such as race, gender, where you live and marital status is not used in credit scores.” – Experian.  And that is absolutely correct.  The FICO score doesn’t take into account whether you are male/ female, white/ black/ purple/ etc…, live in a high income crime free neighborhood or low income high crime neighborhood.  But, it does take variance into account.  What are these variances?  Name, address, phone number, employer, and social security number variances.  The FICO algorithm calculates multiple variances of your personal information as a negative credit item.   In short, having more than 2 addresses, names, phone numbers, etc…, is going to bring down your score.  The reason why this hurts your score is stability.  Having lots of names and addresses shows instability, it shows you use different aliases and move around a lot.  Lenders want to loan money to stable people, ones that have one name, one address and one phone number.  And the Fair Isaac Company follows suit.