What would cause this?

[Anonymous]

Your FICO® score decreased to 752 on July 19, 2008.
This score decrease may be caused by these 2 new reasons:

* You recently opened a new credit account.
* You have a short credit history.

Your FICO® score went down on a day when there were no credit alerts on your Equifax Credit Report™. This can happen if:

* There was a change on your credit report that lowered your score but did not trigger an alert. For example, the balance on an account might have increased enough to lower your score, but not enough to trigger a balance increase alert.
* You moved from one category of credit users to another as time passed. For example, you may have transitioned from the category "consumers with a new credit history" to the category "consumers with a two- to five-year credit history". As a result, your credit report is evaluated differently, causing a slight change in your score. The good news is that moving between categories like this usually offers you the potential to reach a higher FICO® score in the future.

I opened a new account on June 21st which gave me and alert and at the same time my score went up 23 points. My credit history is 4 years. I'm not sure what caused the 9 point drop.

[haulingthescoreup]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Your FICO® score decreased to 752 on July 19, 2008.
This score decrease may be caused by these 2 new reasons:

* You recently opened a new credit account.
* You have a short credit history.

Your FICO® score went down on a day when there were no credit alerts on your Equifax Credit Report™. This can happen if:

* There was a change on your credit report that lowered your score but did not trigger an alert. For example, the balance on an account might have increased enough to lower your score, but not enough to trigger a balance increase alert.

* You moved from one category of credit users to another as time passed. For example, you may have transitioned from the category "consumers with a new credit history" to the category "consumers with a two- to five-year credit history". As a result, your credit report is evaluated differently, causing a slight change in your score. The good news is that moving between categories like this usually offers you the potential to reach a higher FICO® score in the future.

I opened a new account on June 21st which gave me and alert and at the same time my score went up 23 points. My credit history is 4 years. I'm not sure what caused the 9 point drop.

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IMO, you've been re-bucketed. That second possibility that I bolded is the classic tip-off. There is often a delay between the triggering event and the re-bucketing. For instance, I got a score jump from adding DH's old Discover account, and then three weeks later,I lost 15 points with the identical message that you got.

Did your oldest account just have a birthday? Or if that four years is your oldest account, what was your average age of accounts before the new account, and then after? Your average age might have gone under two years, which would put you back in the new-with-credit bucket. Or did a baddie fall off (or suddenly appear?)

(Sorry for the late response; I'm trying to catch up.)