Both my Wife and I experience 12 point on average declines when we make sure that we are reporting a small balance on one card. If we can push a payment through on time however and a card reports $2k (still under 10% UTI) we get a 12 point boost across the board. We have CA's and CO's from nearing 6 years ago and both have perfect history since mid 2016 when we both got NFCU secured cards. Scores have risen from 400 to low to mid 600's.
Anyone else experience this?
@spiritcraft1 wrote:Both my Wife and I experience 12 point on average declines when we make sure that we are reporting a small balance on one card. If we can push a payment through on time however and a card reports $2k (still under 10% UTI) we get a 12 point boost across the board. We have CA's and CO's from nearing 6 years ago and both have perfect history since mid 2016 when we both got NFCU secured cards. Scores have risen from 400 to low to mid 600's.
Anyone else experience this?
You would never experience a boost from reporting a larger balance, unless the smaller balance was being reported as zero.
@Anonymous wrote:
Is your card with a balance a major bank card? Anecdotal evidence seems to say it needs to be, and that reporting a balance only on a store card does not work as intended.
Just throwing an idea out there.
It happens every time. The cards in question are NFCU cards with an $8k limit for me and a $15k limit for her.
She has three cards reporting. NFCU Amex $15k, NFCO GoRewards $2k, Secured FNBO $1k and a $3k CLOC
Right now she has a $26 balance on one smaller limit card and dropped 11-15 points when the balance of $2100 on the Amex was reported as paid. The prior month when the last payment was not credited before statement cut, FICO's raised 11-15 points. She has $21k in revolving credit lines. So when she has 11% UTI report, her scores go up. It has to be a bucket thing. Remember there are CO's and CA's that may be influencing this right?
And my scored do the same thing.
@Anonymous wrote:Regardless of bucket, higher utilization isn't going to mean higher Fico scores. The only asterisk to that rule is 1%-8.9% utilization as opposed to 0% utilization... reported we're talking, of course. If you have 1%-8.9% reported utilization and raise it to > 8.9% reported utilization your scores cannot increase. If they are increasing, it's due to something else. The only other possibility as mentioned upward in the thread is that if you are using card(s) that aren't being "counted" by the algorithm and thus are being hit with an all zero (no revolving credit use) penalty.
I do not understand it but it is happening. One such drop on MF had these two succesive notations in same alert where EX dropped 10 points:
"The total balance on all your Bankcard account(s) has decreased by $2296. This change applies to the sum of all Bankcard balances."
- Total Balance
- $43,814.00 ----> $41,518.00
The above figures take into consideration CA's and CO's when in reality, with open accounts, balance had decreased to less than 1% for "open accounts". It is obviously looking at this as though I have $41,518 of about $73,000 outstanding or 56% UTI rather than about 60%. Currently have $31.5k in open CLs
NFCU Flagship, $8k limit balances of $25-70.00 on three different occasions seemed to trigger a score drop. On a few occasions when my last payment, one made to get below 1%, did not post in time I actually saw a higher score.