Hi Dyneemo. Sorry you are experiencing some frustration. The bottom line is that good habits will eventually pay off, I promise. More on exactly what those habits might be in a minute.
First, though, it's important to manage your expectations around how an "alert-based" credit monitoring system works. The alerts are triggered by specific things, e.g. like your credit card balances changing. But typically they do not "alert" you every time your score changes. What that means is that your score could drop (for some reason) and you don't find out about it. Then, days or weeks later, some alertable event happens (for example, you pay down a credit card causing the balance to change).. At that moment, due to the alertable event, it sends you an alert specifying the event and at the same time telling you your score dropped. To you, it seems crazy, like myFICO just told you that paying down a credit card caused your score to drop. But that is not what happened: you are finding out about a score drop that happened for some other reason, maybe weeks ago.
Now you might say: well, hell, what good is it then? That's a fair question. If you find that such an "alert" based system is misleading you and (worse still) upsetting you, you may want to consider a system in which you control the exact moment that your credit score gets pulled. You get your accounts the way you want them (CC balances, etc.) and then you tell the system to do a pull. There are a number of credit monitoring services like that.
Second is the more important question about what might be causing problems in your credit scores and how to adopt habits that will improve them gradually over the next several months and the next few years.
Two of the most important things FICO looks at is payment history (lates, missed payments, collections, etc.) and Amounts Owed, which for your purposes means the amounts on your credit cards in relation to their credit limits. (This is completely different from the debt-to-income ratio that you mention, which FICO doesn't consider at all, since FICO doesn't know what your income is.) You mention that you had a late payment but didn't say when that happened. Can you clarify? (We would need to know any of these negative payment history events and when they happened.) Also can you tell us what your credit card balances are and their credit limits?
