@SirMilo wrote:Well, it was one of those good news bad news days for me today.
I received an email alert yesterday around 1pm from myFico saying that my TU score had changed. The email did not give me any indication of how much it changed or whether it was an increase or decrease. I kept checking my dashboard yesterday to find the alert and/or see a score change. It never showed up in my dashboard and I woke up this morning to find 2 score change alerts in my dashboard. The alert from this morning was from Experian with an 8 point increase for paying my AmEx balance off. The alert from yesterday was from TU and reflected what appears to be a scorecard change since my 2 newest accounts are 365 days old this month:
What a nice thing to wake up to. Unfortunately, the love didn't last long since within 1 hour of seeing this info, another TU alert rolled in, OUCH!:
I paid the balances on all cards before the statement date since I never realized before showing up here 11 days ago that I will be penalized heavily for doing this. I seemingly got lucky that I found myself reporting AZEO last month since I showed a statement balance on my AmEx but paid it before this statement closed. In an attempt to avoid an all zero report, I put a small balance on my BBVA card which had a statement close date 2 days later (closed today) than my card with earliest statement closing date of the month- my Amex. As can be seen above, that was too little, too late with TU. I never thought about my credit reports running different start and end dates and always just assumed (erroniously) reports started at the beginning of the month.
My question is do certain agencies have particular start/end dates which the monthly data is reported as a whole and is it random for every customer? I realize that what I am asking probably isn't very easy to understand since I really don't know how to phrase my question clearly. What I mean is that you can see that TU has recorded score changes for both what I believe to be a scorecard change and an AZ penalty. Neither EX nor EQ has reported any score change for the scorecard (?) or the AZ yet although EX did show an 8 point increase today for paying off the AmEx which I would think indicates that these reports aren't "complete" for the month yet. I am obviously not understanding the start and end dates for my reports from the agencies since there doesn't appear to be any uniformity. I am 100% positive that the AmEx payoff was the determining factor for this TU AZ drop. It appears that TU considers AmEx to be the final card reported for their monthly report even though it has the earliest statement closing date every month. I would say that TU is reporting a full month (for me) from around the 8th-7th (+/- 2 days) according to the way this AZ played out. How do I figure out these dates without falling into this trap again? Do my ACR reports show the last credit line reporting date for the month? I can recover from this on next months report but it sure was disappointing to see that nice increase turn to garbage in an hour.
The alerts you get from MyFICO are time delayed, in variable amounts, and even then do not tell you the date on which an event occurred.
Most of the lenders, including American Express and Bank of America, report the statement balance as the balance used for utilization, and it usually winds up in all 3 of your reports a few days later.
If you had a statement balance, it will be in all 3 of your reports.
So don't overthink it, and don't get misled by the MyFICO alerts as to timing; they are meaningless as to timing.
If you had a statement balance in any of your bank card revolving accounts, you've beaten the all zero penalty.
