On 7/16/2010 by TU FICO was 721. Less than 4 weeks later... my score drops to 691. The difference: 1 timeshare loan no longer has a balance and is paid in full. An old auto loan that was settled for a little less than the actual loan amount and closed in 9/2003 falls off my record completely. I thought these things were suppose to boost my score? What gives? I noticed since the auto loan fell off, my amount of new credit went from great to good. I'm assuming then it affected my AAoA somehow... but 30 points? Someone please make sense out of this for me...
Same thing happened to me. Equifax said my #1 bad thing was a judgement. It feel off last week and I also had a 60 day late payment taken off too. But the 60 day late payment was on a 7 yr acct so it lowered my AAoA. So my score dropped 8 pts from 710 to 702. Was pissed. People said I was in a new bucket though and it would be good in the long run. 
@haulingthescoreup wrote:What are the before and after negatives, in order, on screen two from the two reports?
The before(721) negatives were "Deliquincy + Public record", "not using credit" and "short account history" (this boggles me)
The after(691) negatives are 1 "Public Record"(released tax lien), "not using credit" and "installment balance"
The funny thing is, in the after... the installment balance is less than the before... yet it wasn't cited as an issue in the before. Also... the after is the one with the shorter account history because of an old account falling off my CR yet "short account history" is cited as a negative in the before.
I'm starting to think my score is based on some number that some animal sniffs out of a hat.
@davidsawsparks wrote:
@haulingthescoreup wrote:What are the before and after negatives, in order, on screen two from the two reports?
The before(721) negatives were "Deliquincy + Public record", "not using credit" and "short account history" (this boggles me)
The after(691) negatives are 1 "Public Record"(released tax lien), "not using credit" and "installment balance"
The funny thing is, in the after... the installment balance is less than the before... yet it wasn't cited as an issue in the before. Also... the after is the one with the shorter account history because of an old account falling off my CR yet "short account history" is cited as a negative in the before.
I'm starting to think my score is based on some number that some animal sniffs out of a hat.
That might be the best theory I've read yet.
OK, you're still in the negative score bucket driven by the presence of a public record. "Installment balance" was probably the #4 reason the first time around, but it didn't display, because your myFICO score range only displays 3 negatives. As your scores rise, you'll eventually only see two negatives, and then one, and then none. As history became less of a factor (it probably became #4), installment balance appeared.
You might have had the "short account history" before because your AAoA and longest age were too far apart. I got that for a long time with a longest history of 21 years but an AAoA of 4 years. Now that my AAoA has finally hit 5, that's gone away. Or maybe your longest history became one year older. Or then again, maybe it's something completely different. What were your AAoA and longest history on the earlier report? Do they still show anywhere on the second?
Unless your history changed in some way (either or both AAoA and longest), I don't understand the 30-point drop. That doesn't make any sense, at least not on the amount of coffee I've had today. 
Actually, I think that soccer-watching octopus pulls scores out of a jar.
Starting Score: 550
@poet wrote:Actually, I think that soccer-watching octopus pulls scores out of a jar.
LOL!
PS: for those who don't know about this octopus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_octopus
PPS: In his classic investment guide, Andrew Tobias says if you get 256 people together in a room and have each of them toss a coin eight times in a row, one of them will get heads every time, just as when many people pick investments at random somebody is gonna get lucky many times in a row and to quote Tobias, "one-one out of all 256 in the crowd – will flip heads eight times in a row. What talent! What genius! What nonsense." This is why "past performance is no assurance of future results."