@Anonymous wrote:My balance has been going down but my score has decreased as well. No new inquires, balances, negative remarks, zip. What would cause this?
Decreases in credit card balances would not cause your score to go down unless they all decreased to a zero reported balance.
@Anonymous wrote:My Visa balance was $13. I paid it so the balance went to $0. I got an alert saying one of my scores went down 13 points because of that decrease. My husband got an alert for the same change saying one of his scores increased 4 points.
We charged $16 on another card. The increased balance from $0 to $16 dropped one of my husband's credit scores by 12 points.
So confused by how the small balances are affecting the scores so much and so differently....
The balances I'm talking about are the reported statement balances, i.e. whatever the balance is on the statement.
The FICO algorithms don't like your having completely zero balances.
If you had 3 cards, your best score would come from having 2 cards reporting a zero balance, and 1 card reporting a small balance.
If you have 1 card, you're better off scorewise with a small reported balance than a zero reported balance.
One more thing, you're misreading the MyFICO alert... it did not say "because"... it never says "because". Sometimes there is a causal connection between the alert showing a change in score and the event being mentioned, and sometimes there is no connection.
Agree. The reported statement balances are key. Assumiing they all didn't report zero, I'm not sure where the drop is happening. Unless something else is causing it.
