FICO dipped 48 points in a month!!

[Anonymous]

I truly do not understand what happened.  I have the WAMU card and checked my info for July and I was sitting at 659.  I checked for the month of Aug and it showed 611!  I pulled my CR and the overall revolving balance was before I made my payments for the month. None were reported for July yet.  I made big payments and do not understand why it would have dipped so low. 

Any ideas would be great. 

[Anonymous]

some ideas:

if this was a new account, you get new inquiry, and it brings down your average account age.

Look closer at your utilization--also check ALL of you accounts to see if any new lates are showing up anywhere--that's often the case. Also look to see if any accounts have dissapeared from your report--one fell off mine and my score dropped alot

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure that I'm following you...

On your reports, the balances and credit lines that appear are often NOT current.  They may lag a couple of months, so payments made don't reflect for a month or two.  If there are no new baddies (e.g., a 30 day late notice or a new collection account), then the drop is probably caused by what WAMU is reporting as your available credit and amount owed.  These values are used to calculate your % utilization which should be between 1-9% to maximize score.  If your payments and available credit are incorrect, then either let it slide for another month or so until it updates or contact WAMU.  They'll probably tell you that there can be up to a 60 day delay between payments and reportings.

Rocket01

[Anonymous]

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adl1679 wrote:

I truly do not understand what happened.  I have the WAMU card and checked my info for July and I was sitting at 659.  I checked for the month of Aug and it showed 611!  I pulled my CR and the overall revolving balance was before I made my payments for the month. None were reported for July yet.  I made big payments and do not understand why it would have dipped so low. 

Any ideas would be great. 

---

Wamu pulls FICOs from both TU and Ex.  Double check to be sure the scores were pulled from the same bureau both months.  It could be that simple.

[Anonymous]

Rifleman

I got CL increases that i did not ask for on 3 out of the six of my cards which I did not think would hurt me but maybe that was it.  Another question... I have an APR on my card(3.99) with a pretty high balance (6300) until May 2008.  I also have a card with an APR of 19.9 and a balance of 7k.  B/t the two i  can afford to make about a 650 payment a month.  Do I take advantage of low rate to knock bal down or knockout high int. rate first?  I do not want to lose out on low rate. 

[Anonymous]

If you got CLI's on 3 cards and they report the new higher CL's to the CRA's then that's a good thing! You want that--I doubt that's what it is. Look at your utilization carefully--find out what limits ARE REPORTING...you can do this by clicking on
each of your revolving accounts in the "accounts" section here within MYFICO. I got CLI's recently for AMEX blue and it is not reporting to equifax. First make sure every CL is being reported. Then divide the total reported limits of all your reporting revolving TL's by your Total Balances. If you're over 30%, your score is sure to drop--that could be what it is. It's likely that one of your creditors did not report your credit limit this month--just double check.

I used to be an advocate of "pay highest interest first, regardless of balance" but the more I live my life I realize that it's hard to stick with that plan. I'm recently more an advocate of the "debt snowball" where you pay off the lowest balance the fastest, and then you get satisfaction of actually paying off a TL quicker. We need to feel rewarded as human beings--also, in the long run this can also help because you will have one less account with a balance on your CR if you pay things off quicker, which as you know you lose points for having over 5 accounts with balances.

In your case though your balances are similar so I might just pay off the higher interest rate one first, even though it's a bigger balance. Another thing you could do is pay down the smaller balance and then transfer the higher interest balance to the lower interest card.

[Anonymous]

Thanks rifleman!!!  I defiitely want to feel rewarded for paying off my balances.  I will go with that plan. 

Thanks.