$100 Collection Account added - Score goes up 40 points. Decrease debt by 30%, Score goes down!?

[Anonymous]

In the last 30 days I've paid/paid off 3 accounts on my credit report. Two of them were low balance Credit Cards - 1 now has a $0 balance and the other is 7% of my credit limit. I saw an average 30 point increase in my score across the 3 reports. On the higher limit card, I decreased the balance by 30% and my score went down 17 points.

Here’s where the confusion comes in. Out of nowhere a $108 collection account was just added to my reports – My score goes up 40 points!! What in tarnation!??!??! Why pay it or try to have it removed if it does THIS to my score?!!

Anyone else experience this?

[Revelate]

First question is where are you getting your scores from?  Is it the same bureau / algorithm each time?

Adding a collection is never ever a positive under any FICO algorithm; it can be 0 points lost in some instances, but never gain.  Something else changed that wasn't picked up as a trigger, though I'm a little skeptical if this was your first bit of derogatory information but if you have a dirty file already, maybe.

[Anonymous]

These scores are all from this (myFico) site. I would post a screenshot, but I'm not sure how. What you say about the bads make sense. Perhaps there was an alert that wasn't caught that was postive. 

[Anonymous]

And by "dirty", I have one medical collection.

[Revelate]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

And by "dirty", I have one medical collection.

---

If that medical collection was >$100 under FICO 8 then yeah, adding the second collection might have made zero difference or minimal.  Serious diminishing returns when we're talking negative information, the first is an absolute back breaker, the second through infinite not so much.

Was likely just an uncaught change.