Understanding FICO® Scoring

[cashnocredit]

Sudden EQ FICO drop from 757 to 703

4CCs, one is a Charge card. Report clean. Util is 3%. No Lates, CAs, PRs or Inqs AAoA 2y, oldest 4y, newest just over 1 year.

Possibly rebucketting. OTOH this is lower than the score I had 2 years ago when there was still a PR reporting and I only had 2 cards. Something is messed up.

Anyone else see unexplained drastic drops this year.

[Shogun]

Could be a rebucketing issue.  What's your util at on those cards though?

[Shogun]

OK,,  should get my glasses, I see your util now.  Whoops.  

[cashnocredit]

Make sense of this! It's almost an invisible  CA or PR got into the score but not the report

For each of the following reports the "Positives" are identical:
1 You have no missed payments on your credit accounts
2 You've limited the use of your available credit.
3 You've shown recent use of credit cards

Report Date/ Score
7/19/11  Score 707
You have a public record on your credit report
You have a short credit history. (2CCs Oldest 2.5y,
You've recently been looking for credit.You've recently been looking for credit.

9/15/11  Score 707
You have a public record on your credit report
You have a short credit history.
You've recently been looking for credit.You've recently been looking for credit.

9/30/11   Score 707
You have a public record on your credit report
You have a short credit history.
You've recently been looking for credit.You've recently been looking for credit.

Note: added 2 CCs in Nov of 2011.  PR Dropped in Sept of 2011. Clean report

7/1/12  Score 749
You have a short credit history.
The amount owed on your revolving accounts is too high (All 0 balance except NPSL Amex, overall util:7% )

10/5/12  Score 754
You have a short credit history. (3.8y)
You have too many credit accounts with balances. (4)

1/11/13 Score  703
You have too many credit accounts with balances. (4)
You have a short credit history. (4y)
You have not established a long revolving credit history. ??

[Revelate]

Hmm not sure, but as a swag there are buckets in FICO and having a tradeline less than a year old may put you in one, and all accounts >1 yr puts you in another albeit a higher scoring one. Wild swag even.

That is a substantial drop, did anything else on the report change in the last three months?

[cashnocredit]

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Revelate wrote:
Hmm not sure, but as a swag there are buckets in FICO and having a tradeline less than a year old may put you in one, and all accounts >1 yr puts you in another albeit a higher scoring one. Wild swag even.

That is a substantial drop, did anything else on the report change in the last three months?

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The only thing that changed was that Amex Charge card reported with 3.5k due instead of the prev. month's 2.5k which triggered the SW. Util including Amex is 3%, excluding Amex it's 1%. In the past Amex reporting has made no difference at all in FICO scores. Even when it went from 2k to 22k FICO didn't budge.  I then pulled the MyFico EQ report expecting something to be off. Nothing, even dates, was off. Additionally, the reporting balances, are quite a bit below 4 months ago when my EQ was at 752.

It's really quite odd. Maybe I'll app for C1. Do they send you FICO scores from each of the CRAs?

[Revelate]

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cashnocredit wrote:

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Revelate wrote:
Hmm not sure, but as a swag there are buckets in FICO and having a tradeline less than a year old may put you in one, and all accounts >1 yr puts you in another albeit a higher scoring one. Wild swag even.

That is a substantial drop, did anything else on the report change in the last three months?

---

The only thing that changed was that Amex Charge card reported with 3.5k due instead of the prev. month's 2.5k which triggered the SW. Util including Amex is 3%, excluding Amex it's 1%. In the past Amex reporting has made no difference at all in FICO scores. Even when it went from 2k to 22k FICO didn't budge.  I then pulled the MyFico EQ report expecting something to be off. Nothing, even dates, was off. Additionally, the reporting balances, are quite a bit below 4 months ago when my EQ was at 752.

It's really quite odd. Maybe I'll app for C1. Do they send you FICO scores from each of the CRAs?

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Nope, just one.

Charge cards are well known to not affect FICO '04 models and higher which the EQ Beacon 5.0 score is; I don't have any better information than what I posted earlier, it is pretty odd I agree, but I find it incredibly unlikely that it's suddenly EQ counting the Amex utilization.  

That would be worse than odd actually and actually an incredibly massive problem for a whole lot of reasons .

[Homeowner13]

I recently had a very similar situation. My score dropped 50+ points over the use of credit cards and a new student loan. Even though my utilization was less than it has been in years ~5%. The credit card use was for minimal use like under $200 on 3 the cards with limits of 5k each! Said I had too many credit lines with balances.

[cashnocredit]

Got a score alert today. FICO has climbed from 703 to 738.  There has been absolutely no change to my credit report since the drop last week to 703.  This is not rebucketing. This is FICO with a software bug.

[cashnocredit]

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cashnocredit wrote:

Got a score alert today. FICO has climbed from 703 to 738.  There has been absolutely no change to my credit report since the drop last week to 703.  This is not rebucketing. This is FICO with a software bug.

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Correction. This 35 point rebound resulted from WF reporting a 0 balance from a couple hundred reducing the number of cards reporting a balance. No net affect on Util. Apparently, having the newest card being 1 y/o has resulted in rebucketing and greatly increasing the impact of "number of cards with balances"  In the past this made much less difference, perhaps dropping FICO 5 to 10 points. For instance all of my cars reported small balances a few months ago with a FICO in the 750's. Now it is THE major negative factor and dropped EQ FICO to 703 though the TU FICO is still up in the 750s.

Very strange behavior. I might add another card just to see if the bucket changes.