The concept behind your FICO score is to give you a 3-digit number to indicate how much of an honest borrower you are.

But FICO has a very specific definition of what an honest borrower is. For FICO, an honest borrower is someone who has no 90-day late payments within the past 24 months.

Your FICO score predicts your chances of having a 90-day late payment on your credit report. Not likely? You get a higher score. Very likely? You get a lower score. 

It's 90 days, not 30 or 120

FICO specifically targets 90 days late. Not 30 days late or 120 days late. As we are going to explain further in the post, it is important to know this in order to better understand your FICO scores and how a late payment will affect it.

What does FICO base its prediction on?

FICO predicts based on the history of your credit report. They examine whether you’ve already been 90 days late on a payment in the past. That flags you as someone with high chances of being 90 days late again. If you’ve been 30 days late or 60 days late, that will also bring up your chances of being 90 days late, but a little less than if you really got to the 90 days.

FICO then assigns a score for you accordingly. The higher your chances are, the lower your FICO score will be. Of course, should you have a 90-day late on more than one or multiple accounts, your likelihood of having more of those in the future goes up. So FICO will give you an even lower score.

Once you're 90 days late, the damage is done

Your score will drop as soon as you hit the 90-day late mark. You’re already considered a difficult borrower once you’re 90 days late on a payment. From then on, even if the late becomes 120 days late or if it becomes a charge-off, your score may drop a bit more, but not much more. Because at this point, it won’t make much of a difference, as you’ve already reached the point that FICO considers bad.

That means that until now, FICO looked at your 30-day late payments here and there and lowered your score due to that, as it showed you’re likely to be 90 days late too. But they still had some belief in you that you’re not that bad of a kid, and that you wouldn’t go so far as 90 days late. But once you’ve reached the 90-day mark and above, they sort of lose faith in you. If you did it once you’re likely to do it again. 

How can I clean up my mess?

Once the mess is done, it’s done. The delinquent mark will be on your credit report in red, and even paying the balance won’t remove the negative mark. For now, you need to be super careful about it never happening again. The more time passes without being late on payments again, the more you are proving yourself not to be a repeat offender, and slowly, FICO will reward you bit by bit with higher scores.