Hi TryingForTheDream. Welcome to the forums!
To expand on what ABCD2199 said, paying off ALL of your credit card balances can actually hurt your score. Not using credit is as bad as using too much of it (but not as bad as using nearly all or all of it). If you can list all of your cards, the credit lines, and the before and after balances that would be helpful. Where are you getting your credit scores from, and which scores are they? There are actual FICO scores used by lenders and so-called FAKO scores that can differ radically from actual FICO scores.
There may be other issues at play here besides the balances, though. Have you recently applied for new credit (including the beginnings of the mortgage), or opened any new credit accounts? Is the timing of the "late" payment different enough from the credit card paydown to not be the issue?
It is illegal for a creditor to report you as 30 days late if you made a payment prior to 30 days after the due date. Some subprime lenders try to state that 30 days means 1-30 days, but it means 30-59 days. I would contact the creditor to request them to report this correctly. If that does not work, contacting the credit bureaus to dispute would be the next step, and ultimately the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
@Anonymous wrote:Yep nothing there would tank your score.
The only thing I can think of is that your 30D late actually popped up on the credit reports BEFORE the credit monitoring site actually showed you there was a late inflicted, but for whatever reason they actually were able to calculate a new FICO score because of the late.
The other thing I am thinking could have happened is that you paid down debt AFTER your statement date.
For example: If you had a card with a $1500 limit but $0 balance but last month ran it up to $1500. Then you paid the minimum before the due date of $50, let $1450 report at statement cut and then paid the $1450 off. It reported a high utilization at statement cut even though you paid it off AFTER, so it won't report $0 until the next statement.
What balances are reporting on your credit reports? $0s? Or close to max?
Going with this exactly. Unless those are your only balances reporting to the credit bureaus and your total credit lines are above $200k, you're not being punished for excessively low utilization. FICO scoring is based on risk - just as someone using a lot of their credit (raises hand) presents a higher risk than someone who is using just a little, the person who is essentially not using their credit (in that one snapshot of time on a credit report) is just as risky since they're not showing that they use that credit. FICO scores are optimal when your reported overall balances are 1 to 8.9% of your total available credit (this is usually expressed as under 10%, but the pitfall is that 9.01% rounds up to 10%). Again, unless you're reporting $2020 in the total balances you wrote above on over $200k in credit lines, the score loss would not be due to paying off the cards.