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How can this be? Transunion (myFico) score dropped 14 points after removing 4 charge offs and 1 collection that were 6 years old, thought it would go up not down?!?! I was able to remove these using the online dispute in the span about a week.
This could happen for a few reasons... it's not at all uncommon.
Were these your only negative accounts? You may be experiencing a scorecard reassignment (aka rebucketing), which sometimes results in a score decrease. You can research this topic in the forums for more details and further understanding.
Were the charge offs your oldest accounts? How did removal of the 6 year old chargeoffs affect you average age of accounts (AAoA)? If removal caused your AAoA or AoOA (age of oldest account) to drop below an age threshold for scoring, that would cause a score drop. That drop may have exceeded the number of points gained from removal, resulting in a 14 point deficit.
Try not to sweat the point loss - a clean(er) report with slightly lower scores is better than a dirty report with higher scores any day. The points will return with time and you now have a higher ceiling for score growth. This is actually a good thing so...Congrats!
Just curious, what/where is the online dispute tool you used to remove them?
If you have no "baddies" on your report now, your score should probably go up soon.
Even one "baddie" vs zero "baddies" tends to stifle scores.
Do you have considereble utilization of your credit cards? That would stifle the score, too.
I couldn't get out of the high 600s, even though I had an absolutely perfect record of paying off my credit cards for more than a decade, until I lowered the utilization on my credit cards. I was just making the minimum payments.
@Anonymous wrote:Just curious, what/where is the online dispute tool you used to remove them?
It's the standard dispute form on the Transunion website (you can also use Credit Karma which links to Transunion for disputes) but you would need to be within the Early Exclusion (EE) window to successfully have negatives removed from your report in this manner. Transunion will remove up to 6 months early. If you know when a derogatory account is due to reach its 7 year mark for removal, then you can determine when you'll be within the 6 month window and eligible to request an EE. For the dispute, the reason would be "too old to be reported".
Experian removes up to 3 months early, but this is already baked into their scheduled drop dates so asking is unnecessary. Equifax may delete up to 1 month early.