@Lel wrote:
@ztnjpv wrote:BTW, the only thing I can think of to explain this is that having zero balance across all my cards somehow lowered my score. But if that's the case, that's pretty stupid. FICO should get a little more sophisticated and find a way to know that the card was used between updates even if it's reporting a zero balance. All my cards had balances that were paid in full before the statement date. Sometimes I leave a few bucks on one or two. This month, I left nothing. If that's bad for a score, something needs to change.
Here's the problem: the FICO score can only be calculated from the information that is provided to the CRAs by the creditors. The credit card companies do not provide day-to-day information about balances and payments to the CRAs. They only report a single amount - the statement balance - once a month.
There's no way to change the FICO score to see information that isn't reported to the credit bureaus.
I think people oversimplify this, not certain why.
Pull a real Experian report, there's more data than just statement balance on the consumer-visible report. If lenders are reporting it to EX, presumably it's being reported to EQ/TU as well. I can also nearly guaruntee you that there's additional information reported that we don't see. In general folks on this forum tend to think that FICO is simplistic: it may be kludgy, unintuitive, or even ass-backwards sometimes from our perspective, but simple is absolutely not an adjective which fits.
ztn: I would contend looking at said EX report that it's easy to tell whether there's activity on the card, but since we don't know for certain, it just winds up being zealots on the forum (like myself) arguing opposing positions unfortunately. The sad thing is I don't think it'd even cost Fair Issac, or the bureaus, or anyone else to make some parts of the model more public... like whether it really is so stupid that it can't tell one $0 balance from another.
