topic Re: TU score dropped 75 points! Update: Or not! Lesson learned! in Understanding FICO® Scoring

TU score dropped 75 points! Update: Or not! Lesson learned!

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 22:11:55 GMT

Update: Well, this should be a cautionary tale about trusting Credit Karma and VantageScore (or whatever it's called). I bit the bullet and paid to pull all three bureaus and no such horrifying score drop to be found. TU is 755, which is the second highest, Equifax was 760-something and Experian was 730-something.

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Let me preface this by saying, I may understand why my score dropped, but that much??

I did a balance transfer from a personal loan to a 0% (AmEx ED) to save myself a little bit of money in interest for the next year. Naturally, I expect the new balance on the card to affect my score, but yikes!

Equifax, by comparison, with all of the same information reporting, shows a 9-point drop (to 743) compared to TU's 75-point drop (to 684).

To hopefully remedy this situation, I moved part of a credit line from another AmEx card to the ED, boosting that credit limit and subsequently lowering my utilization on that card from 60% to 30%. Should this help? It's literally the only thing I can see that would cause this drastic drop. I've had a couple inquiries, and I closed a couple of cards (my own request, credit lines transferred to existing cards before closure). I'm only using 6% of my total credit, 100% on-time payments, nothing else negative going on.

Thoughts? Does this seem like a normal drop given my situation?

Re: TU score dropped 75 points! Update: Or not! Lesson learned!

DollyLama — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 17:05:38 GMT

Only thing I can think of to cause that big of a drop is- the personal loan was your only installment open reporting a balance, thus losing the credit mix (30-40pts), the balance transfer, albeit to save money, was at a very much lower utilization threshold, particuarly under <28.9% aggregate. One of the cards you close was your Oldest cards, and it reduced significantly the AAoA, and Age of Oldest.

Re: TU score dropped 75 points! Update: Or not! Lesson learned!

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 20:27:19 GMT

I have a mortgage, auto loan, and another loan (for a lawn mower at 0%), so that's not it. And my oldest card is 25 years old and still being used monthly. The cards I've closed are cards I've had for a year or less.

Anyway, like I said, once I got the legit scores instead of the Credit Karma ones, it all looks fine. TU is 755 according to that.