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What is the list of accounts you have, bank and card name, limit, open balance? Any lates on each of these cards? If so how significant is the late, 30, 60 days or more?
Current No Missed Payments
American Express - CL $1000, Bal $150
American Express - CL $10,000, Bal $6000
American Express - CL $5000, Bal $2000
Citi - CL $2000, Bal $1500
Negatives from early 2013
Is there a BK anywhere in your past? No
Any accounts sent to collections, which may have refreshed with a collection notice? Not to my knowledge
You say there are three accounts due to age off lates. What is the history of those? All early 2013
@Anonymous wrote:I ahve attached a copy of my alert showing why it dropped. I cannot make any sense of it either since everything else hasn't changed on my Experian report.
An alert is not the reason of a score drop. An alert is letting you know something changed on your CR. The alert in this case is absolutely not related to your score change. It's crucial for you to understand this and also to understand that there has to be another change to your CR that caused the score drop.
MF, it would be really great if after many years of this going on (confused members like the poster above) that you'd finally fix the issue. It's really getting ridiculous.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I ahve attached a copy of my alert showing why it dropped. I cannot make any sense of it either since everything else hasn't changed on my Experian report.
An alert is not the reason of a score drop. An alert is letting you know something changed on your CR. The alert in this case is absolutely not related to your score change. It's crucial for you to understand this and also to understand that there has to be another change to your CR that caused the score drop.
MF, it would be really great if after many years of this going on (confused members like the poster above) that you'd finally fix the issue. It's really getting ridiculous.
+1 It is ridiculous that MyFICO doesn't clear this up, and relies upon us to do it.
@Anonymous wrote:
It seems that paying credit card balances and lowering your utilization doesn't always equal a higher score, and YES, sometimes your score drops.
Correct that lowering your utilization doesn't always equal a higher score, because scores only increase when thresholds are crossed. There's not a linear score gain, like X number of points for Y number of dollars; It doesn't work that way. Therefore it's perfectly possible that lowering utilization 1%-2% could cause a score increase, but then lowering it another 15% may have no impact on score at all.
Incorrect however that lowering your utilization sometimes drops your scores. The only asterisk to that is if you lower your utilization from an already low amount of (say) 1%-8.9% to 0% [no reported non-zero balances] which can result in a no revolving credit use penalty. Any other utilization drop from a non-zero percentage to a lower non-zero percentage will not lower a Fico score. If you believe you've seen that happen, like the previous poster you're being mislead by alerts and/or other changes to your CR caused the change giving you a false positive regarding the utilization [drop] being the reason.
I swear i think Experian is fixed with myfico.My score went up 4 points for the same $117 decrease in my balance on my EQ report.
This is all too confusing and seems dumb how they factor this.
I even ordered a new report to check the changes and that was the only change as the one stated the $117 decrease on EX
There are tons of changes going on with your CR that aren't alertable. Just because you don't receive an alert doesn't mean that your report isn't changing week to week. It is.
You can't say "my score went up for the same $117 decrease" because in doing so you're again making the major mistake in automatically connecting your score change to the alert reason. As stated many times previously, these two things don't have to be at all releated.
@Anonymous wrote:I swear i think Experian is fixed with myfico.My score went up 4 points for the same $117 decrease in my balance on my EQ report.
This is all too confusing and seems dumb how they factor this.
I even ordered a new report to check the changes and that was the only change as the one stated the $117 decrease on EX
Something to keep in mind, if a person has a dirty file, with lates or charge offs of various kinds, the updates and scoring buckets that these baddies are put into, are not fully understood. In a file with no lates, then it's more a matter of aging and utilization, areas that are a little easier to pin down. With lates, it seems every person with some lates has a different mix of timing and severity. Because of this, my opinion is that it is possible a real reason, a clear driver, may not be determined. Since your score headed below 600, that implies some fairly significant refresh of data, perhaps a reported late was updated and became "more recent" through that update. I don't know, I'm just suggesting some possibilities.
The good news is, after these baddies fall off in 2020, your scores should start to rise very nicely. When your file has all accounts paid on time, that is when scores start to consistently go up (pending utilization factors and new account factors).
Thanks for the help. I'm hoping the same thing too that once the bad ones drop it will help and bring it back up somewhat. It seems like that is what is killing me the most but luckily I only got a couple months for all negatives to fall off. I hope I can update then and give a positive result.