A two point drop

[BallBounces]

For fun:

Happened to look at Experian Fico8 today and noticed a two point decrease, mid month.  That seemed interesting enough to see if I could figure out what changed.  Experian told me two things:

• The percentage of your accounts always paid on time decreased by 1%, which usually means there is a new account with a delinquency.
• The average age of your accounts decreased, from 6 years 10 months to 6 years 9 months.

Of course I know I do not have a new delinquency and it was faitly obvious an old closed account has dropped off.  I looked at my spreadsheet of aging accounts and note that an old Sync card reached exactly 10 years since closure date and appears to have dropped off.  

I will say, I think both the points lost are related to the proportion of accounts with a delinquency, and NOT related to the AAoA moving one month, but I can not be certain.  Anyway, some interesting ionformation for those who care about 2 point moves.

[Patient957]

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@BallBounces wrote:

For fun:

Happened to look at Experian Fico8 today and noticed a two point decrease, mid month.  That seemed interesting enough to see if I could figure out what changed.  Experian told me two things:

• The percentage of your accounts always paid on time decreased by 1%, which usually means there is a new account with a delinquency.
• The average age of your accounts decreased, from 6 years 10 months to 6 years 9 months.

Of course I know I do not have a new delinquency and it was faitly obvious an old closed account has dropped off.  I looked at my spreadsheet of aging accounts and note that an old Sync card reached exactly 10 years since closure date and appears to have dropped off.  

I will say, I think both the points lost are related to the proportion of accounts with a delinquency, and NOT related to the AAoA moving one month, but I can not be certain.  Anyway, some interesting ionformation for those who care about 2 point moves.

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Obviously not a meaningful change, but since scoring models are deterministic, there is a reason, and it's fun and interesting to speculate.  While it's likely only a matter of time until some curmudgeon comes and tells us it's only 2 points and not worthy of discussion or speculation, I'll do just that.

I doubt it's due to an age threshold, because you would have gained the 2 points recently on the way up.  

As for  proportion of delinquent accounts, is this believed to be a scoring metric?  I've never heard of it (but that doesn't mean much).

[BallBounces]

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@Patient957 wrote:

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@BallBounces wrote:

For fun:

Happened to look at Experian Fico8 today and noticed a two point decrease, mid month.  That seemed interesting enough to see if I could figure out what changed.  Experian told me two things:

• The percentage of your accounts always paid on time decreased by 1%, which usually means there is a new account with a delinquency.
• The average age of your accounts decreased, from 6 years 10 months to 6 years 9 months.

Of course I know I do not have a new delinquency and it was faitly obvious an old closed account has dropped off.  I looked at my spreadsheet of aging accounts and note that an old Sync card reached exactly 10 years since closure date and appears to have dropped off.  

I will say, I think both the points lost are related to the proportion of accounts with a delinquency, and NOT related to the AAoA moving one month, but I can not be certain.  Anyway, some interesting ionformation for those who care about 2 point moves.

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Obviously not a meaningful change, but since scoring models are deterministic, there is a reason, and it's fun and interesting to speculate.  While it's likely only a matter of time until some curmudgeon comes and tells us it's only 2 points and not worthy of discussion or speculation, I'll do just that.

I doubt it's due to an age threshold, because you would have gained the 2 points recently on the way up.  

As for  proportion of delinquent accounts, is this believed to be a scoring metric?  I've never heard of it (but that doesn't mean much).

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That's why I mentioned it!  It is not discussed much.

[Realist]

I'm going to play devils advocate here and speculate a little differently.  Maybe I'm completely wrong on this.  Since the three credit bureaus are free to sign up for and monitor your score for free, by default you always receive random emails from them.  "Your score went UP".  "Your score went DOWN".  You login, and it goes up or down by one or two points, unless you really screwed up.  But, but, on my way to login, I'm met with upgrade options, something to purchase or upgrade with for my account.

Perhaps it's a design feature.  Keeping that score flat doesn't do much for marketing, but moving the needle one way or another, a client gets interested in looking into "why".  No one works for free in this business.  There has to be profit somewhere.

I get the one or two point bump near monthly (nothing ever changes in core credit rotation), and ever since I've signed up for these credit bureause, it's nearly harassment the amount of emails I get from them.  I have to opt out - too much spam.  With the way they're written, you would think I've gone from mid 800's down to 600's.  Exaggerating, but not so much.

[Thomas_Thumb]

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@BallBounces wrote:

For fun:

Happened to look at Experian Fico8 today and noticed a two point decrease, mid month.  That seemed interesting enough to see if I could figure out what changed.  Experian told me two things:

• The percentage of your accounts always paid on time decreased by 1%, which usually means there is a new account with a delinquency.
• The average age of your accounts decreased, from 6 years 10 months to 6 years 9 months.

Of course I know I do not have a new delinquency and it was faitly obvious an old closed account has dropped off.  I looked at my spreadsheet of aging accounts and note that an old Sync card reached exactly 10 years since closure date and appears to have dropped off.  

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What computation resulted in a 1% change in accounts always paid on time? When the no delinquency account dropped off did you go from (10 of 11 to 9 of 10) or perhaps (9 of 10 to 8 of 9) accounts always paid on time? This reason statement has been mentioned in front end summaries previously. Hovever, I don't recall seeing it on a Fico reason code list.

The cause of a score shift is not always associated with a listed reason statement. For example total accounts on file changed as well. Could total balance in $, highest card UT or AG UT have changed between the 2 score pull dates?

[BallBounces]

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@Realist wrote:

I'm going to play devils advocate here and speculate a little differently.  Maybe I'm completely wrong on this.  Since the three credit bureaus are free to sign up for and monitor your score for free, by default you always receive random emails from them.  "Your score went UP".  "Your score went DOWN".  You login, and it goes up or down by one or two points, unless you really screwed up.  But, but, on my way to login, I'm met with upgrade options, something to purchase or upgrade with for my account.  

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I look at Experian virtually every day, which is pointless and a different issue (ha!).  Per a recent post of mine, the score remained unchanged for literally 6 months, before a single 10 point increase assocated with AoYA.  This mid month 2 point drop was very specifically related to an account agiong off at 10 years to the day.  Which result of that occurance caused the drop is the only (academic) question.

Point is:  CRAs are not moving MY score to sell product.  Or if they are, then they are terrible at it.

[BallBounces]

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@Thomas_Thumb wrote:

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@BallBounces wrote:

For fun:

Happened to look at Experian Fico8 today and noticed a two point decrease, mid month.  That seemed interesting enough to see if I could figure out what changed.  Experian told me two things:

• The percentage of your accounts always paid on time decreased by 1%, which usually means there is a new account with a delinquency.
• The average age of your accounts decreased, from 6 years 10 months to 6 years 9 months.

Of course I know I do not have a new delinquency and it was faitly obvious an old closed account has dropped off.  I looked at my spreadsheet of aging accounts and note that an old Sync card reached exactly 10 years since closure date and appears to have dropped off.  

---

What computation resulted in a 1% change in accounts always paid on time? When the no delinquency account dropped off did you go from (10 of 11 to 9 of 10) or perhaps (9 of 10 to 8 of 9) accounts always paid on time? This reason statement has been mentioned in front end summaries previously. Hovever, I don't recall seeing it on a Fico reason code list.

The cause of a score shift is not always associated with a listed reason statement. For example total accounts on file changed as well. Could total balance in $, highest card UT or AG UT have changed between the 2 score pull dates?

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Something like 48 accounts are in the file.  2 of those accounts have a delinquency.  When the old acount was removed, I still had 2 delinquency accounts, but one less total account.  Hence, their rounding "1%".

UTI aggregate and individual is less than 1%, and naturally the closed 10 year old card had a 0 balance.  Regardless there were no balance changes between the days.

[LiamDavis]

Thanks for sharing!

[BrutalBodyShots]

Hey there @BallBounces! It seems the term "proportion" is being used interchangeably with "percentage." In terms of scoring factors that changed with the drop off of your positive account, all I can really think of is "number of accounts paid as agreed" dropping by 1. Nothing else should have been impacted related to the Payment History slice of the FICO pie near as I can tell. Like @Thomas_Thumb said, there's no known FICO negative reason code for proportion / it's not something referenced in the Credit Scoring Primer. I'm a scoring junkie like you, so I'd definitely want to know about those 2 points as well.

Did you see any shift in your TU/EQ F8 scores or corresponding negative reason codes?

[BallBounces]

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@BrutalBodyShots wrote:

Hey there @BallBounces! It seems the term "proportion" is being used interchangeably with "percentage." In terms of scoring factors that changed with the drop off of your positive account, all I can really think of is "number of accounts paid as agreed" dropping by 1. Nothing else should have been impacted related to the Payment History slice of the FICO pie near as I can tell. Like @Thomas_Thumb said, there's no known FICO negative reason code for proportion / it's not something referenced in the Credit Scoring Primer. I'm a scoring junkie like you, so I'd definitely want to know about those 2 points as well.

Did you see any shift in your TU/EQ F8 scores or corresponding negative reason codes?

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lol "new user" BBS.

I can not recall if there was a 2 point (small) change on TU/EQ when that account dropped off.  And in fact, TU accounts seem to fall off later, and EQ accounts more often stay around much longer. I have EQ accounts that should have aged off many years ago, but remain only on EQ.

Anyway ... I don't recall.