Score dropped 17 points for nothing?!

[midnightmath]

Hi all,

I noticed a thread here that said when they paid off their sole credit card, their score dropped.  Well, I just paid off one of my cards (from a $70 balance to 0) and my score dropped 17 points.  The question is, do they have to be my cards that report a balance?  For example, I'm an AU on the spouse's AMEX BCP, and that reported a balance this month, but all my cards are paid off.  I thought the balance from the AU cards would count since it is on my CR.  Is this wrong?

I've lost about 40 points on my Experian report in the past two months due to paying off a car loan (I did replace it with a new one) and now this.  I'm worried because I need a car loan next month and I've gone from 670 to 630 in the blink of an eye - with no major changes on my CR.

Suggestions?

[HiLine]

The way the FICO 08 model treats AU's is still a mystery. Do you have other cards of your own that reported non-0 balances on the most recent bills?

[midnightmath]

No, I didn't.  But this is EX, not EQ. (Although my EQ tanked, too by about 10 points.)

Is there a FICO 08 for EX as well?

I guess next month I'll try to let one of my cards post a balance in addition to the AU card.  Ugh - this upsets me because I'm going to be applying for a very large loan and my score is low enough without all this garbage.

[HiLine]

Oh I should have asked where you got the scores from. If your scores are from myFICO.com, they are all FICO 08 scores.

[midnightmath]

Yeah, they're from the three bureau monitoring here.  Honestly, this is really making me sick.  I had reasonable scores a couple months ago, and they just seem to go down, down, down .... ugh.

[Anonymous]

I am a AU on Amex and it counts with my FICO score (cant say it works for everyone). When I rec'd alerts, it specifically alerted me to the Amex account increasing my score 33 Pts.

[midnightmath]

When I got the alert this month that my AMEX balance went up, there was no score change.  Just this morning, I got a notification that one of my cards went from a $71 to a $0 balance, and that caused both my EX and EQ scores to drop from 13-17 points each.  It's baffling to me.  There were no other changes to my CR.