@Aahz wrote:
In this past week I paid off two cards with 0% Balance Transfers down to zero. Paying off $11,000+ of my $30,000 in debt I was carrying and dropping utlity from 12% to 7%
EQ FICO8 742 -> 761
TU FICO8 752 -> 772
EQ Vantage (CK) 732 -> 703
TU Vantage (CK) 726 -> 703
Yes, my Credit Karma FAKOs took massive hits for paying off more than a third of my credit card debt.
No, there were no other changes. I track my reportsactivity obsessively.
The devil is in the details.
How can a balance transfer actually reduce UTIL? Something doesn't add up.
You didn't pay off any debt. You did a balance transfer that shifted debt around presumably to save money on interest, the main reason to do a balance transfer.
IMO one should be able to explain why any score changed. Without knowing the algorithm we can't exactly predict what the score will be, but we should be able to explain why a score went up or down.
We can only guess, a score cannot tell me what was in your credit report nor what mix the score was exactly based on.
However based on the information you presented, this is what likely happened in your situation.
The card you did the balance transfer from reported first and the two cards you reduced to zero didn't make the Vantage 3 report at the time it was generated. So your total debt at that moment in reporting time looks like $30K + 11K or $41K, a big increase.
The FICO 8 score could have been based on one or both of the cards with zero being reported without the card that now has 11K of debt on it, or some maybe all three new balances are on there.
Another unknown factor, was the balance transfer card a NEW credit account, and if so, how does that affect UTIL and HP.
IF you can look at the details of the reports that went into the 4 different credit scores, you should be able to understand why they went in this direction.
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I agree with you, one score cannot be used to predict another score, the details of the credit reports at one instant in time are what the scores are based on and what is used to generate all the scores. The problem in trying to use the score to understand changes is that none of the date used to generate the score is in any way synchronized.
Right now in my EQ and TU reports a Sears Visa shows two different balances even though the card reported at the same time and credit karma updated the reports on the same day, I expect the EQ and TU report data was collected at different times, and neither balance is the accual balance on the credit card.
Day to day the scores will all move in individual ways, however over time any trend up or down should be reflected in a similar trend up or down in the other scoring model. Maybe not as big a change, not the same numbers, but the same sort of trend.
Give it some time and the Vantage scores should go back up a lot and I won't be surprised to see the FICO scores go down a little. If you did the balance transfer with a new card, that is also a factor by itself.
