CREDIT SCORE DROPPED 15 POINTS after paying down credit card? How?

[Tinkerbell319]

I have about 6 cards... and 3 out of those 6 are paid down to 15% to 30% usage now... I have 2 over the limit of being maxed out and 1 that's 85% usage for the last two months. Now I pay a card down, and boom... I get a drop in my score?

Why ? I'm discouraged. If I pay my next 3 down... I might get an even bigger drop. 

[Girlzilla88]

The drop is likely due to something else or did your one card recently max out?!     That can still affect your Overall/AGG UTL?!

[Shooting-For-800]

The ONLY time your score will drop lowering debt is when you pay off a loan or pay off the only credit card with a balance.

Something else is going on. 

Never let your score fear interfere with lowering debt.

[Jnbmom]

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@Shooting-For-800 wrote:

The ONLY time your score will drop lowering debt is when you pay off a loan or pay off the only credit card with a balance.

Something else is going on. 

Never let your score fear interfere with lowering debt.

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+1000

if you can pay down your debt by all means do it!!! Sometimes we tend to focus on scores more than our financial well being 

[SouthJamaica]

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@Tinkerbell319 wrote:

I have about 6 cards... and 3 out of those 6 are paid down to 15% to 30% usage now... I have 2 over the limit of being maxed out and 1 that's 85% usage for the last two months. Now I pay a card down, and boom... I get a drop in my score?

Why ? I'm discouraged. If I pay my next 3 down... I might get an even bigger drop. 

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You did not get a score drop from paying anything down. Something else caused it.

[donkort]

Did you close the card you paid on?  Especially if it's an older card, that could bring your score down.  Because of "average age of accounts."

I hope the credit card company didn't close your card.  

I'm worried that I might get cards closed on right after I might my recent big payments.

[SouthJamaica]

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@donkort wrote:

Did you close the card you paid on?  Especially if it's an older card, that could bring your score down.  Because of "average age of accounts."

I hope the credit card company didn't close your card.  

I'm worried that I might get cards closed on right after I might my recent big payments.

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Closing a credit card doesn't affect your average of accounts in FICO. The closed account continues to be counted in your average age of accounts until it's removed from your credit reports, which is usually many years down the road.. typically 10 years or so.

[donkort]

I should have actually known that.  I have about 6-7 closed accounts in my report at this moment.

But I heard one shouldn't close cards because that action would decrease your FICO score.

[Tuscani]

The only area of scoring where closing an account can hurt you is in the revolving utilization calculations. While a closed revolving account with a balance is included in utilization, a closed account with a zero balance is not.

In the area of length of credit history, closed accounts are treated no differently than open accounts.  That is, the length of history on a closed acct still gets counted right along with the rest of the closed account's history.  In fact, the length of credit history gets counted for every trade line on your report, regardless.

So, the only harm by closing a revolving account is to the utilization percentage, while, in the long run, a closed account will be removed from your credit file after 10 years, which could lower your score at that time due to the loss of that history.

[Anonymous]

I can think of one other potential situation where it could harm potential score. Or at least keep you from reaching a higher score.

If you reduce the number of revolvers to less than 7, you reduce your ability to reach the lowest thresholds for number of revolvers with a balance on some algorithms. But if you’ve still got at least 7 active revolvers, you’re good. Also if it were to bring you to probably 3 revolvers, you could get the negative reason code for too few accounts on some algorithms and be penalized

But like everyone else said it doesn’t touch age and paying down a revolver did not cause a point loss.