How often do scores change?

[Anonymous]

I'm new here.  Just got my score.  What a surprise, it dropped 20 points from 2 years ago!  Apparently because I paid for a cruise to get points.  I have paid the MC balance in Full.  Why did I take a hit on my score?

A little history to back this up, I have no mortgage, no installments, lots of credit cards, I use 2 of them and pay the full balance each and every month.

Or maybe I shouldn't worry if my score went from 816 to 796?

[JoeBJay20]

Welcome to the forums!

Your score is just a snapshot of your report at the time you request it.  How often it changes depends on how often information in it changes.  Generally, I would just say that charging something on your card may have caused the drop, but since you're talking about a two year period, there could be numerous other factors involved.  That being said, your scores are excellent, I'm assuming they're both FICO scores.  Any score about 750 is great, so there's no need to worry about movement up or down once you exceed that point. 

If you want more information about what factors affect your score, you can visit the credit scoring 101 thread.

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&thread.id=29793

[Lel]

Higher scores tend to be more sensitive to minor changes in one's credit profile.  I'm a little confused about how paying for a cruise to get points would appear on your credit report - are you saying that one of your credit cards reported a higher-than-usual balance?  If that's the case, it could have a negative effect on your score, especially if the utilization of your available revolving credit went up by quite a bit.

However, with scores 2 years apart, you can't really blame a higher current credit card balance on a drop in score, since you can't prove that your score was actually higher immediately before the new balance was reported.

With a score of 796, I don't think you need to fret about this change.  Whatever it is you're doing with regard to debt management, keep it up....