topic Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report in Understanding FICO® Scoring

Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

cashnocredit — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 05:22:56 GMT

Sudden EQ FICO drop from 757 to 703

4CCs, one is a Charge card. Report clean. Util is 3%. No Lates, CAs, PRs or Inqs AAoA 2y, oldest 4y, newest just over 1 year.

Possibly rebucketting. OTOH this is lower than the score I had 2 years ago when there was still a PR reporting and I only had 2 cards. Something is messed up.

Anyone else see unexplained drastic drops this year.

Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

Shogun — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 13:57:13 GMT

Could be a rebucketing issue. What's your util at on those cards though?

Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

Shogun — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 13:57:51 GMT

OK,, should get my glasses, I see your util now. Whoops. :)

Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

cashnocredit — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 22:35:52 GMT

Make sense of this! It's almost an invisible CA or PR got into the score but not the report

For each of the following reports the "Positives" are identical:
1 You have no missed payments on your credit accounts
2 You've limited the use of your available credit.
3 You've shown recent use of credit cards

Report Date/ Score
7/19/11 Score 707
You have a public record on your credit report
You have a short credit history. (2CCs Oldest 2.5y,
You've recently been looking for credit.You've recently been looking for credit.

9/15/11 Score 707
You have a public record on your credit report
You have a short credit history.
You've recently been looking for credit.You've recently been looking for credit.

9/30/11 Score 707
You have a public record on your credit report
You have a short credit history.
You've recently been looking for credit.You've recently been looking for credit.

Note: added 2 CCs in Nov of 2011. PR Dropped in Sept of 2011. Clean report

7/1/12 Score 749
You have a short credit history.
The amount owed on your revolving accounts is too high (All 0 balance except NPSL Amex, overall util:7% )

10/5/12 Score 754
You have a short credit history. (3.8y)
You have too many credit accounts with balances. (4)

1/11/13 Score 703
You have too many credit accounts with balances. (4)
You have a short credit history. (4y)
You have not established a long revolving credit history. ??

Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

Revelate — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:27:03 GMT

Hmm not sure, but as a swag there are buckets in FICO and having a tradeline less than a year old may put you in one, and all accounts >1 yr puts you in another albeit a higher scoring one. Wild swag even.

That is a substantial drop, did anything else on the report change in the last three months?

Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

cashnocredit — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 16:09:36 GMT

Revelate wrote:
Hmm not sure, but as a swag there are buckets in FICO and having a tradeline less than a year old may put you in one, and all accounts >1 yr puts you in another albeit a higher scoring one. Wild swag even.

That is a substantial drop, did anything else on the report change in the last three months?

The only thing that changed was that Amex Charge card reported with 3.5k due instead of the prev. month's 2.5k which triggered the SW. Util including Amex is 3%, excluding Amex it's 1%. In the past Amex reporting has made no difference at all in FICO scores. Even when it went from 2k to 22k FICO didn't budge. I then pulled the MyFico EQ report expecting something to be off. Nothing, even dates, was off. Additionally, the reporting balances, are quite a bit below 4 months ago when my EQ was at 752.

It's really quite odd. Maybe I'll app for C1. Do they send you FICO scores from each of the CRAs?

Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

Revelate — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:07:04 GMT

cashnocredit wrote:
Revelate wrote:
Hmm not sure, but as a swag there are buckets in FICO and having a tradeline less than a year old may put you in one, and all accounts >1 yr puts you in another albeit a higher scoring one. Wild swag even.

That is a substantial drop, did anything else on the report change in the last three months?

The only thing that changed was that Amex Charge card reported with 3.5k due instead of the prev. month's 2.5k which triggered the SW. Util including Amex is 3%, excluding Amex it's 1%. In the past Amex reporting has made no difference at all in FICO scores. Even when it went from 2k to 22k FICO didn't budge. I then pulled the MyFico EQ report expecting something to be off. Nothing, even dates, was off. Additionally, the reporting balances, are quite a bit below 4 months ago when my EQ was at 752.

It's really quite odd. Maybe I'll app for C1. Do they send you FICO scores from each of the CRAs?

Nope, just one.

Charge cards are well known to not affect FICO '04 models and higher which the EQ Beacon 5.0 score is; I don't have any better information than what I posted earlier, it is pretty odd I agree, but I find it incredibly unlikely that it's suddenly EQ counting the Amex utilization.

That would be worse than odd actually and actually an incredibly massive problem for a whole lot of reasons :).

Re: Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

Homeowner13 — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 05:13:05 GMT

I recently had a very similar situation. My score dropped 50+ points over the use of credit cards and a new student loan. Even though my utilization was less than it has been in years ~5%. The credit card use was for minimal use like under $200 on 3 the cards with limits of 5k each! Said I had too many credit lines with balances.

Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util report

cashnocredit — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:10:05 GMT

Got a score alert today. FICO has climbed from 703 to 738. There has been absolutely no change to my credit report since the drop last week to 703. This is not rebucketing. This is FICO with a software bug.

Re: Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util repor

cashnocredit — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:26:29 GMT

cashnocredit wrote:
Got a score alert today. FICO has climbed from 703 to 738. There has been absolutely no change to my credit report since the drop last week to 703. This is not rebucketing. This is FICO with a software bug.

Correction. This 35 point rebound resulted from WF reporting a 0 balance from a couple hundred reducing the number of cards reporting a balance. No net affect on Util. Apparently, having the newest card being 1 y/o has resulted in rebucketing and greatly increasing the impact of "number of cards with balances" In the past this made much less difference, perhaps dropping FICO 5 to 10 points. For instance all of my cars reported small balances a few months ago with a FICO in the 750's. Now it is THE major negative factor and dropped EQ FICO to 703 though the TU FICO is still up in the 750s.

Very strange behavior. I might add another card just to see if the bucket changes.

Re: Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util repor

jamie123 — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 05:38:03 GMT

Yeah, I have noticed the same thing happens to my score. For each card more than 1 that reports a balance your score will take a hit no matter how small the reporting balance is. I lost 10 points for 1 month when a second card reported a $2.99 balance.

Re: Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util repor

cashnocredit — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 08:34:09 GMT

cashnocredit wrote:
cashnocredit wrote:
Got a score alert today. FICO has climbed from 703 to 738. There has been absolutely no change to my credit report since the drop last week to 703. This is not rebucketing. This is FICO with a software bug.

Correction. This 35 point rebound resulted from WF reporting a 0 balance from a couple hundred reducing the number of cards reporting a balance. No net affect on Util. Apparently, having the newest card being 1 y/o has resulted in rebucketing and greatly increasing the impact of "number of cards with balances" In the past this made much less difference, perhaps dropping FICO 5 to 10 points. For instance all of my cars reported small balances a few months ago with a FICO in the 750's. Now it is THE major negative factor and dropped EQ FICO to 703 though the TU FICO is still up in the 750s.

Very strange behavior. I might add another card just to see if the bucket changes.

Util went from 2% ish to >80%, No other changes. EQ FICO up 6 points to 744. Go figure.

Ok, the Util is where it is because a charge card reported and now is above my total CLs and 20 times higher than when my FICO plummeted to 703.. Obviously Charge cards make no difference at all. This suggests the initial huge drop was purely some sort of rebucketing that is gradually correcting itself.

FWIF, the Citi EQ FAKO has been and remains stuck at 757, exactly where FICO was before its inexplicable plunge. At least it is also ignoring Charge card balances.

Very odd how FICO flips out during bucket changes. If that's what it was.

Re: Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util repor

cashnocredit — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 05:35:46 GMT

Today WQ FICO has returned to 755 from the drop to 703. Two of three credit cards now reporting a zero balance. A fourth charge card is reporting >50k balance but that seems to have no impact on FICO scores.

Looking over this it appears that rebucketing, either once the oldest account reaches 4 years or the youngest 1 year, resulted in a dramatic drop in an apparent extreme but new sensitivity to having all the CCs reporting a balance, even though they were very small ones. Prior to this the same sort of reporting would only result in about a 10 point drop. Interesting.

Re: Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util repor

BlueNightStar — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:20:55 GMT

cashnocredit wrote:
Today WQ FICO has returned to 755 from the drop to 703. Two of three credit cards now reporting a zero balance. A fourth charge card is reporting >50k balance but that seems to have no impact on FICO scores.

Looking over this it appears that rebucketing, either once the oldest account reaches 4 years or the youngest 1 year, resulted in a dramatic drop in an apparent extreme but new sensitivity to having all the CCs reporting a balance, even though they were very small ones. Prior to this the same sort of reporting would only result in about a 10 point drop. Interesting.

Thank you for sharing this information. If I understand this correctly, the youngest account aging to 1 year results in a rebucketing that takes a harsher look at number of CCs with balance. This may explain why I never gain or lose points for the number of CCs with balances (that I can tell). Since I am rebuilding I've added multiple cards in the last two years. The only thing that seems to move EQ for me is inquiries/new accounts. BTW, I have 1 card >10 years and 1 >7 so the 4 year oldest theory would not apply to me. Although I will say that EQ seems to weigh the length of accounts heavily, I got an 11 point increase when the oldest card reached 10 years and nothing else changed on my report. My EQ score never moves more than 5 points in either direction.

Re: Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util repor

cashnocredit — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 05:09:45 GMT

BlueNightStar wrote:
cashnocredit wrote:
Today WQ FICO has returned to 755 from the drop to 703. Two of three credit cards now reporting a zero balance. A fourth charge card is reporting >50k balance but that seems to have no impact on FICO scores.

Looking over this it appears that rebucketing, either once the oldest account reaches 4 years or the youngest 1 year, resulted in a dramatic drop in an apparent extreme but new sensitivity to having all the CCs reporting a balance, even though they were very small ones. Prior to this the same sort of reporting would only result in about a 10 point drop. Interesting.
Thank you for sharing this information. If I understand this correctly, the youngest account aging to 1 year results in a rebucketing that takes a harsher look at number of CCs with balance. This may explain why I never gain or lose points for the number of CCs with balances (that I can tell). Since I am rebuilding I've added multiple cards in the last two years. The only thing that seems to move EQ for me is inquiries/new accounts. BTW, I have 1 card >10 years and 1 >7 so the 4 year oldest theory would not apply to me. Although I will say that EQ seems to weigh the length of accounts heavily, I got an 11 point increase when the oldest card reached 10 years and nothing else changed on my report. My EQ score never moves more than 5 points in either direction.

It isn't clear whether the rebucketing was from the oldest account reaching 4 years or the youngest 1 year. They both happened at the same time. I will find out when I add another CC in a month or so. Seeing FICO drop from 757 to 703 when the only thing that happened was a slight increase in my Amex was rather shocking.And then watching FICO recover when Amex reported >10x that balance, well, it leaves one questioning the quality of these FICO engines.

In any case these things matter much more with a clean report. Lower scores when negs are present tend to respond less to inqs, balances, and such.

Re: Updated! Major drop - FICO now lower than 2 years ago when I had a PR on a clean, low util repor

cashnocredit — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:15:57 GMT

The change and big drop has been verified to be rebucketting. After reducing the number of revolvers reporting a balance to 1 from 3 EQ FICO returned to 755. I then increased the number (stopped prepaying) and let the 3 return with somehwat higer balances (15% overall util) . FIC dropped to 690. which is lower than it was when I had a PR and CAs with only a 2 year history and 2 cards both reporting.

Obviously this "bucket" is a strange one.