How to raise your FICO score 10 points and save a bunch of trees – MythBusting

Lately there has been some great debate about the use of authorized credit lines by about individuals with low FICO scores to boost them.

No, I am not going to reheat this great debate since Jay and Shailesh got it covered, however the same topic was part of an offline discussion I had at lunch today. A discussion which lead to another subject – boosting your credit score by 10 points by opting out receiving pre-screened credit offerings

Perhaps I have been oblivious to knowing about a website called www.optoutprescreen.com and in a nutshell this is what they do:

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the Consumer Credit Reporting Companies are permitted to include your name on lists used by creditors or insurers to make firm offers of credit or insurance that are not initiated by you (“Firm Offers”). The FCRA also provides you the right to “Opt-Out”, which prevents Consumer Credit Reporting Companies from providing your credit file information for Firm Offers.

Through this website, you may request to:

• Opt-Out from receiving Firm Offers for Five Years – (electronically through this website).
• Opt-Out from receiving Firm Offers permanently – (mail Permanent Opt-Out Election form available through this website).
• Opt-In and be eligible to receive Firm Offers. This option is for consumers who have previously completed an Opt-Out request – (electronically through this website).

There are many loan officers who believe that opting out from getting these pre-screened offers can boost the individual credit score by 10 points, however optoutprescreen.com states that opting out will not do anything to your credit. Frankly, I am tired of getting so much junk mail and I am considering to get to the bottom of it a la MythBusters (testing a hypothesis).

Unfortunately, I have not kept track of how much junk mail (credit offerings) we have received in the mail and opting out right now will most likely not give me an accurate result even though I am very tempted to do it right now. Also, I have not pulled my own credit rating lately so I cannot be sure right now what my wife’s and my scores are. There will also be most likely a change to our score due to a recent sale of one of our investment properties. So there are too many variables right now and not enough historic data which does not allow to accurately test this hypothesis.

So here is the plan:

For the next 60 days Blair and I are going to count all the pre-screened credit offerings from companies which we are not customers. We will pull our consumer credit score tomorrow to establish the basis for proving or busting the myth. On August 8th we will tally up on how many pre-screened offerings we received, verify our FICO scores again and opt out from the pre-screened offers. Then we will repeat the same process for the following 60 days and see if there is really a significant decrease in the amount of credit card offerings we received and if our FICO scores went up the 10 points.

Let’s see if we can prove or bust this myth raising the credit score by 10 points. I am just wondering on how many trees could be saved if every consumer would opt out right now….