I've been rebuilding for over a year and I know the consistent advice is to not worry too much about short term fluctations and vagaries of FICO scores. Still, I'm hoping to buy a house next year and am watching everything like a hawk.
My Equifax score was 637 coming into today, and it's been pretty much at that level now for a couple of months. I have small credit card lines...about $2500 in total. The past couple of months, I've been between 90% and 100% utilization...mainly because the lines are so small and with work expenses, and paying off a lien, I'm living sometimes pretty close to the edge, despite a high income.
But this month I've started attacking util% and my first step was paying off a $650 balance on a $700 CL card. I paid it off a week or so ago, it reported today, down to $0 and my scored dropped three points.
Now, I didn't neccessarily think I'd get a signficiant initial bump on my score as that was about 25% of my balance (another couple of cards are also at $0 now and within about a week I should be at below 30% util.) But why in the world would my score actually drop 3 points by paying off my card and having a $0 balance with a $700 CL??
Wow can this stuff be frustrating!!!
