All zero scoring penalty

[MrFiah]

New to having a Fico scoring so please forgive what's probably a basic question.   When I got my first score, there was a balance of $5 reporting.  Cards reported again without having any balance report, score dropped 16 points.  I don't see any changes so I am assuming this is just the difference in AZEO vs Zero reporting.  Does this sound about right?  I was expecting just a couple points, not 16 but I understand every profile is different.

[SouthJamaica]

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@MrFiah wrote:

New to having a Fico scoring so please forgive what's probably a basic question.   When I got my first score, there was a balance of $5 reporting.  Cards reported again without having any balance report, score dropped 16 points.  I don't see any changes so I am assuming this is just the difference in AZEO vs Zero reporting.  Does this sound about right?  I was expecting just a couple points, not 16 but I understand every profile is different.

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Probably that's it.

But few of us have experience analyzing a 1-card portfolio.  So you can teach us more than we can teach you.

[Anonymalous]

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@MrFiah wrote:

New to having a Fico scoring so please forgive what's probably a basic question.   When I got my first score, there was a balance of $5 reporting.  Cards reported again without having any balance report, score dropped 16 points.  I don't see any changes so I am assuming this is just the difference in AZEO vs Zero reporting.  Does this sound about right?  I was expecting just a couple points, not 16 but I understand every profile is different.

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Sounds about right. Last year when I had one card (plus an AU card, which is supposedly scored separately for AZEO), I briefly let it report a zero balance, and lost 17 points on EX FICO 8. I can't verify whether my score would have bounced back, because a new card reported before I returned to AZEO, and I lost a lot of age.

But earlier this year, after I had three cards (+1 AU), I let them go to all zero again, and lost 14 points on EX FICO 8. I regained all 14 points the next month, when I reverted back to AZEO.

New/thin files are very sensitive, and our scores fluctuate a lot more than older and thicker files.

[expatCanuck]

I inadvertently paid all balances a while back (clean thick file) -- IIRC, score took a 15-20 point hit.