How insane is this?

[Anonymous]

I paid off a credit card and my FICO dropped 8 points.

[rainobot]

Paying off is a good thing. It will eventually go up! Just give it some time. 

[Shogun]

It's called the "rollercoaster effect" when in the rebuilding stages.  Don't worry about it, your score will improve.

[llecs]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I paid off a credit card and my FICO dropped 8 points.

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Specifically it can be caused by a couple of postential reasons, provided ABSOLUTELY nothing else changed and assuming you are looking at a FICO and using the same version for the before and after comparison. First, all $0 balances oddly enough are a negative. Paying down a CC resulting in all $0 balances on your CR can drop your score. For max points, pay all to $0 except for one and get one to report under 9% of the CL. The second reason could occur if that paid down CC was closed. Under FICO scoring, closed accounts with a balance can still factor into util. However, once paid off they are removed and that can have a negative scoring impact if your overall util becomes higher as a result of that CC's removal from util.