Hello AMXBlack! Hope you had a happy Christmas.
It looks like you have six cards:
AMX Green (25k)
Wells Fargo Visa (7500)
GM Card (15k)
NC State Employees (3500)
AMX Business Gold Card (65K)
Wells Fargo Business Card (15K)
It looks like the last two are business cards. Are any of the first four cards business cards? It's likely that FICO does not count any business cards toward your personal credit profile, for instance total credit limit (etc.).
Let's assume that FICO looks at your profile and views you as having four cards (AMEX, WF VISA, GM Card, NCSE).
It sounds like your Wells Fargo Visa had a $0 for at least a few months in a row, and then it reported with a $1500 balance. You are right that your score drop was not cause by that card having a 20% utilization. But what did happen is that you reduced the number of cards that were showing a $0 balance. FICO likes it when it sees several $0 balance cards.
If you had three cards with a positive balance, and then the WFV reported positive, that caused you to go from 75% of your cards with a positive balance to 100% of your cards with a positive balance.
If you had two cards with a positive balance, and then the WFV reported positive, that caused you to go from 50% of your cards with a positive balance to 75% of your cards with a positive balance.
"Number of accounts showing a positive balance" is one of the factors that affects your FICO score.
The good news is that the "damage" that this does to your score is very temporary. As soon as you start having two or three cards with a $0 balance, you will gain back all the points you lost. This factor (as well as utilization %) is an easy factor to control. It's why you will often hear on the forum the advice that, any time you want to maximize your score for an important credit pull, just pay all your cards to $0 except one and leave something small report on that remaining card.
