Confused by a score drop

Anonymous · ‎11-28-2014

I got an score alert this morning and I was shocked that I had a 13 point drop (687 to 674 EQ). I've been diligently paying off my diliquent credt and I've been waiting for things to report PIF, which probably won't be until the beginning of next month. I paid off BOA and Citicards, both of which were closed and I paid off my WF CO as well. The confusing thing is the reason for the score drop which was:

You've made heavy use of your available revolving credit.

The only open account is a Gettington account with a 0 balance and CL of $650. They only remaining account that I'm paying off is Springleaf (transfer from Beneficial) which is closed, has been closed for years with a balance of $8500 (was $20,000) and the last couple of months I've been making almost double payments. So I'm really confused on this comment. I've been using my debit card and paying cash for everything. I don't have any credit cards to use.

Any thoughts? I'm really upset with this score drop. It's the first drop I've had since I've been religiously paying attention to my scores.

Lemmus · ‎11-28-2014

...in the year+ I've been actively monitoring my credit scores, I've found that they swing ~20 points plus/minus almost every month even with no obvious changes, often with nonsensical explanations ...one CRA score will go up, another down, ad infinitum ...since myFico provides little to no rationale to the public for their algorithms, I just chalk it up to fairy dust ...if it moves down significantly in consecutive months I'd look into it, otherwise its just background noise that you notice only because you're paying close attention.

Anonymous · ‎11-28-2014

Have you closed any other credit cards recently? Or have you opened any new accounts?

If you close your cards off, it's possible your balance-to-limit ratio is affected.

Anonymous · ‎11-28-2014

@Anonymous wrote:
Have you closed any other credit cards recently? Or have you opened any new accounts?

If you close your cards off, it's possible your balance-to-limit ratio is affected.

That could be it. I had one account that's been PIF for over a year but still noted that it was open only on EX and that it's reported managed by CCS. I had that corrected. It shows correct on the other 2. Makes sense now. Hopefully it goes back up next month when my other PIF post. Thanks for the help.