Was I re-bucketed or something?

[JLK93]

There seems to be quite a bit a discussion in this thread about score drops due to inactive cards reporting activity.

I just looked over almost 3 years worth of myFICO Equifax alerts. I only counted alerts generated from times when my scores were below 850. The following alerts were observed:

2 alerts -- card inactive for 12 months reporting activity

1 alert   -- card inactive for 10 months reporting activity

1 alert   -- card inactive for 8 months reporting activity

3 alerts -- card inactive for 7 months reporting activity

I lost a total of 0 points for these alerts. I realize that this could be Scorecard dependent. If there is anything to this, it certainly seems that at some point I would have lost at least 1 point. It is difficult to understand why the developers of the algorithm would add a penalty for using an inactive card. It defies logic.

I suspect that the people seeing score drops for using inactive cards are attributing cause and effect to myFICO alerts.

[Thomas_Thumb]

As many know, Fico has developed/published a list of reason codes and statements for factors that may impact score. I surmize that anything on the list may indeed afftect score under certain circumstances - which FICO does not divulge.. "Time since account activity is too long" is one of those reason statements (reason code J9) as shown in the 2nd paste below. If it can't affect score, it would not be listed. The list was published by Fico in 2013 and is titled: US FICO Score Reason Codes. 

Important side note: I don't see this reason statement in Experian's score factor guide (2014) that reflects Fico 04 & likely Fico 08 nor in the Credco list which reflects Fico 04 and Fico 98

[kuku4koco]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hey SouthJ.  Have you considered being the poster boy for testing this whole "inactivity" thing?

You seem like you might be the perfect person, given that you have got so many credit cards and almost all of them report $0 each month.

If you don't mind me asking, of your 25 (?) open cards, how many are,,,,

REPORTING $0 BUT ACTIVE, defined as...

     *  Have reported $0 every month for the last 8 months

     *  Have had a charge placed on them at least every 60 days

REPORTING $0 BUT "INACTIVE", defined as....

     *  Have reported $0 every month for the last 8 months

     *  Have had no charges or payments of any kind made to them for the last 8 months

If you were to wait till your profile feels really stable, then take all the cards in the first group and place $5 on them and let them report, it would be interesting to see what alerts and reason codes and score changes happened in the next 40 days.

Then you could wait till things quieted down and a couple months later do the same thing with the cards in the second group.

A slight tweak that feels right to me is that I would exclude from this test any cards that are less than 8 months old and also any that have never been used even once.  Such cards might behave strangely and would not be good test cases I think.

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This applied to me recently.... I have an account (CareCredit) that showed 'no activity for 8 months' 2/1/2016-10/1/2016:  "your score has not changed".  Hope this helps(?)

[wasCB14]

My EX and EQ from Amex and Citi also fell, though from a lower starting point to a higher ending point compared to TU.