topic Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756. in Understanding FICO® Scoring

MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

TB — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:11:49 GMT

THE WAY FICO IS DETERMINED IS *****!! I ALWAYS PAY ON TIME AND NEVER MISS A PAYMENT. I NEVER PAY INTEREST. AND YET MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Patient957 — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:12:31 GMT

@TB wrote:

THE WAY FICO IS DETERMINED IS *****!! I ALWAYS PAY ON TIME AND NEVER MISS A PAYMENT. I NEVER PAY INTEREST. AND YET MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Payment history comprises only 35% of your FICO score. The other 65% is based on other factors.

30% of your FICO score is based on amounts owed, which includes revolving utilization. In certain cases, it's possible to pay your statement balances each month but still have high utilization.

Theres also a thing we call the "all zeros penalty" when all your credit cards report a zero balance at the same time. It costs about 20-30 points, I think.

You may not like the way FICO scoring works but nobody really cares whether you like it or not, and it is what it is. Okay, maybe @FICOdawg cares. You two can get together and complain to each other. That should be fun.

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Anonymous — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:12:58 GMT

@Patient957 wrote: That should be fun.

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Varsity_Lu — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:13:24 GMT

@TB

You need a paradigm shift. What you think FICO is and what FICO actually is are not the same thing. FICO isn't changing anytime soon, so your only option is to change the way you think about it.

It does not measure how good you are with money.

It does not measure your wealth.

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

TB — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:13:55 GMT

OK Varsity_Lu. Explain it to me please!? All I see in your reply is what you say it doesn't do! Please explain to me exactly how FICO works and what FICO is?

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

TB — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:14:38 GMT

Hello Patient957. I still maintain what I said when I first started this post. If a person pays on time, all the time, there should be no other factors. The system for credit wants people to pay interest so they can make money! That's all it is. That's why FICO measures a person's credit score the way they currently do.

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Varsity_Lu — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:15:09 GMT

@TB

Well, first off, please drop the attitude. MF is a place to grow, learn, and help. Your first ever post here is a complaint written in all caps followed by a reply to me rife with attitude. Go to reddit if you want to take that approach.

But, if you want to actually learn and not just beach, then you will find a place here at MF. @Patient957 has already given you a lot of great things to think about. Be willing to learn and change.

Now, as to your question. FICO measures your ability to handle debt. That's it. Nothing more. By your own admission in your first post, you don't have any credit card debt and you don't pay any interest. It's really that simple. I had no credit cards and no loans for many, many years. I owned my home outright and had $70k in the bank to add an addition. Lowe's (Synchrony of all banks!) denied me a small credit line because I was unscorable. Let that sink in. Me, a guy who had done everything the right way for 25+ years and had cash in hand couldn't get a stinking Synchrony card. It's because I had no debt and they didn't know how I would handle it. I was a risk which means a low score.

Think about this: you have three credit cards and you pay them all off each month: you get penalized for all accounts reporting zero balance. You put $3000 on one and let it go a month: your score goes up. You pay off a car loan in full: your score goes down. You get another car loan: your score goes back up. Someone with a mortgage and a car loan will almost always score higher than me because I don't have that debt on my report. It's a measure of debt, not wealth. If you want a higher score, you have to have debt AND manage it well.

I get that you are frustrated. You seem to have the right approach in terms of managing your credit cards and that is probably the biggest obstacle to financial health. My advice is this: manage your finances in a responsible way while still learning how to manipulate things FICOwise in your favor. AZEO is a great place to start. Learn about the score penalties for new accounts, inquiries, more than half reporting, all zero, etc. My score went from unscorable to over 800 in about 2 years once I learned how the system really works. Instead of being frustrated, learn and grow.

By the way, welcome to the MF forum! I hope it helps you as much as it has helped a lot of us!

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Patient957 — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:15:40 GMT

@TB wrote:

I still maintain what I said when I first started this post.

Of course you do, because it's easier to just draw a line in the sand than it is to learn about how credit scoring models actually work and why.

If a person pays on time, all the time, there should be no other factors.

No credit scoring models work that way. There are good reasons why they consider other factors. A person with high utilization and a lot of debt is much more likely to default than a person with low utilization and very little debt, even if both have always paid on time.

The system for credit wants people to pay interest so they can make money! That's all it is. That's why FICO measures a person's credit score the way they currently do.

I have paid exactly zero credit card interest in the last 8 years and my Fico 8s are all in the 800s. Many other people on these boards pay zero interest and are at or near 850.

Maybe you should make the effort to learn the actual reason(s) why your score dropped from 805 to 756. Here's a hint: It has nothing to do with not paying interest.

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

FicoMike0 — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:16:11 GMT

@TB

Sorry for your frustration. 49 points is a big drop, but 756 is still a respectable score.

If you just want to rant, go ahead, you certainly aren't the first. It's totally ok.

If you want to figure out what happened, there are wizards here that really can help.

You make a lot of comments on how fico scores should be. That's like how gravity should work. There's no should to it. It just is what it is. Sure, there are things that don't seem to reduce our credit worthiness that reduce our score. Most of us here avoid those things. There are things that don't seem to improve our credit worthiness that increase our scores. We do those things and laugh when our scores increase. I picked up 30-40 points with a fake loan that costs $4 a year. I make sure all my accounts never report zero balance at the same time. That would be a 20-25 point penalty.

Re: MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Patient957 — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:16:43 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:

There are things that don't seem to improve our credit worthiness that increase our scores. We do those things and laugh when our scores increase. I picked up 30-40 points with a fake loan that costs $4 a year.

The fact that you can and do manage said fake loan over months and years is evidence of creditworthiness.

I agree it's a credit hack, and we probably get more points than we deserve out of it, but it demonstrates more creditworthiness than someone with no loan and no months and years of payments or, otoh, someone with many loans who's drowning in debt.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

FicoMike0 — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 23:47:17 GMT

@Patient957

Thanks. I was carefull to pay it just under 9%, to $188. I have read that penfed sometimes forgives the loan when the balance drops below $50 or so. That's fine if there's only two months left, not if there's two years, lol. of course, the balance slowly increases toward 9+%. My management effort is to remember to pay $2, around new years and again near summer solstice every year. This also creates a little account activity.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

TB — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:26:43 GMT

To Varsity_Lu and anyone else that replies to my opinion about how the FICO scoring is applied. I appreciate the information that you think you know. And unless you actually are a FICO employee or worker, how could you possibly know for sure what you are stating as to how FICO works. My reply wasn't an attitude as you say! It was just fact! I still maintain what I said when I first started this post. The FICO scoring should be on two things only. One, if you always pay on time. And two, if you never default. That's it. The system just wants to make money off of the ridiculous amount of money they charge for interest.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

Varsity_Lu — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:53:25 GMT

@TB

Well, good luck on your journey.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

JoeRockhead — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:30:29 GMT

@TB wrote:
To Varsity_Lu and anyone else that replies to my opinion about how the FICO scoring is applied. I appreciate the information that you think you know. And unless you actually are a FICO employee or worker, how could you possibly know for sure what you are stating as to how FICO works. My reply wasn't an attitude as you say! It was just fact! I still maintain what I said when I first started this post. The FICO scoring should be on two things only. One, if you always pay on time. And two, if you never default. That's it. The system just wants to make money off of the ridiculous amount of money they charge for interest.

Fico doesn't make money off whether someone is paying interest or not. They make money off lenders by assessing the risk of default by potential borrowers.

Never being late on a payment would be the same as never defaulting, no? However, even though someone has had a long history of on time payments, that's only one part of the equation. If that same person starts carrying large balances, statistics, and historical data points show they also have an increased likelihood of defaulting in the future. So, the more someone's reported utilization goes up, the more their scores will go down.

For example, take someone that has a perfect payment history, maybe always pays in full to avoid paying interest, but gets a shiny new card with a $20k limit and 0% for 21 months so they decide to... go on a dream vacation that costs $15k. That puts them at 75% utilization on that card. What this does is:

Gets them a score penalty for the utilization on that card that is near what's considered maxed out.
Gets them a penalty for highest individual card utilization.
Depending on total available credit, may also push them above known aggregate utilization thresholds that draws more scoring penalties.

The two biggest factors of your score are payment history, and utilization. While it's great to have an impeccable payment history, it's also important to always have low reported utilization (interest free or not). Reported revolving utilization is also something that doesn't have a memory (unlike late payments) so while someone might get dinged for having a higher reported balance, it's also something that's easily manipulated by paying balances down. As balances go down, scores go back up.

Is it a system without flaws, no. Is a system that is always fair to everyone and every situation, also no. But, it is a system that... as a whole, has done a good enough job at assessing risk for such a long time that lenders overwhelmingly still rely on it when it comes to making lending decisions.

While no one here has the exact secret sauce recipe, there is a plethora of information and data points that prove to be facts about many aspects that affect Fico scoring. These are all things that aren't conjecture, or things people think they know. They're well documented facts based on 10s of thousands of data points within this forum alone. You can't change the way Fico scores things, but you can educate yourself to a great degree on how things work based on what countless people have contributed here.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

Patient957 — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:42:16 GMT

@TB wrote:
To Varsity_Lu and anyone else that replies to my opinion about how the FICO scoring is applied. I appreciate the information that you think you know.

Yes, of course you do.

And unless you actually are a FICO employee or worker, how could you possibly know for sure what you are stating as to how FICO works.

Empiricism and inductive reasoning. Look them up; you might learn something.

I still maintain what I said when I first started this post.

Yes, of course you do.

The FICO scoring should be on two things only. One, if you always pay on time. And two, if you never default. That's it.

Wait, I thought it was only one thing, and now you're saying it's two. You're kind of wishy washy about all this.

The system just wants to make money off of the ridiculous amount of money they charge for interest.

The man is keeping us down.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

Horseshoez — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:35:44 GMT

@TB wrote:
My reply wasn't an attitude as you say! It was just fact!

Apparently you are confusing your nouns; absoultely nothing you've written is "fact", what it is, is "opinion", and your opinions, while important to you, are easily dismissed as pure conjecture and fantasy by the rest of us.

Thanks for the good laugh.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

Anonymous — Fri, 02 May 2025 23:26:28 GMT

@TB wrote:

THE WAY FICO IS DETERMINED IS BS!! I ALWAYS PAY ON TIME AND NEVER MISS A PAYMENT. I NEVER PAY INTEREST. AND YET MY SCORE HAS GONE FROM 805 T0 756.

Post your data points and many ~~number geeks (cough @Thomas_Thumb)~~ people here can walk you through what happened with a very high degree of accuracy.

@TB wrote:

Please explain to me exactly how FICO works and what FICO is?

Besides being ***** how do you think it works? I mean the actual equations and algorithms.

@TB wrote:

I still maintain what I said when I first started this post. If a person pays on time, all the time, there should be no other factors.

You didn't really state that in your first post.

@TB wrote:

The system for credit wants people to pay interest so they can make money! That's all it is. That's why FICO measures a person's credit score the way they currently do.

Hmm, well, simpistically perhaps, kind of.

"A business is an organization that engages in commercial activities, typically involving the production or sale of goods and services for profit."

I provide services/products in my business and I expect to turn a net profit. Either that or I go out of business.

@TB wrote:

.. anyone .. that replies to my opinion about how the FICO scoring is applied. I appreciate the information that you think you know. .. I still maintain what I said when I first started this post.

All you really said in your first post is "THE WAY FICO IS DETERMINED IS *****!!" and that your score was 805 and for a yet explained reason is now 756.

Is there something about 805 that does more for you than 756 ?

Re: FICO IS BS!!

TB — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:09:14 GMT

Hello Joe. Yeah, I realized after I sent the last reply. "Never being late on a payment would be the same as never defaulting, no? " But I still maintain what I said. As long as a person always pays on time without missing a payment, their FICO score should remain higher than 800 or even a perfect 850 until they miss a payment. I don't think that just because historical data/facts points towards other individuals all of a sudden racking up more debt etc. should impact the ones that always payb on time even if they all of a sudden show accelerated account openings. Each individual's score should be determined on their merit of not defaulting. Not on everyone else's.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

TB — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:13:18 GMT

Don't reply any longer to my post.

Re: FICO IS BS!!

TB — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:18:22 GMT

To ALL reply your criticizing comments. Good for you! Instead of just replying about the original post I posted, now there ar several of you that have to attack me personally. It's funny when people who think that they are so smart, that can't come up with an answer, that they have to attack and degrade someone on public posts like these.