@Anonymous wrote:I always see on thse forums that its best to only have one card reporting with a low balance and I started paying off low blance cards, but it seems every time I pay one off, my score drops. Why would that be? Nothing else has changed besides a $0 balance reporting. Is it actually better to have a small balance on all cards?
No, it's better to have a zero balance reporting on a majority of your cards, and a small balance on one or a few.
@Anonymous wrote:I always see on thse forums that its best to only have one card reporting with a low balance and I started paying off low blance cards, but it seems every time I pay one off, my score drops. Why would that be? Nothing else has changed besides a $0 balance reporting. Is it actually better to have a small balance on all cards?
Each file is different. Can you list out which cards you have, year/month opened, CL, last statement balance? Any lates or baddies in your file?
What are your myFICO scores? What sort of score changes are you seeing?
@Anonymous wrote:I always see on thse forums that its best to only have one card reporting with a low balance and I started paying off low blance cards, but it seems every time I pay one off, my score drops. Why would that be? Nothing else has changed besides a $0 balance reporting. Is it actually better to have a small balance on all cards?
The problem most newer members of the forum have is they have very busy reports with lots of things going on.
The few revolving accounts (or one which is optimal for everyone regardless of number of revolvers) holds true for every file, but with a lot of changes going on it's hard to isolate a single thing as the monitoring resolution isn't really all that fantastic... the balance change was a trigger, but 1 or more actual changes which produced the change in FICO score were rolled up in that one update: they just hadn't been broken out previously.
On my file where I can go more than a year without getting any score change except for balance changes and some of the other testers currently and previously, it is evident, but it's hard to isolate a change on a busy report, even with how well I know my own report last year going through mortgage process and then an app spree, yeah, not so stable so other than big swings wasn't much I could do with it post app spree.
Ok, thanks for listing the details.
The USAA card is at 83% utilization.
Unfortunately, as long as those 2 lates are on your report, yeah, baddies. Sorry. Not the worst baddies, but nevertheless....
5 cards opened in the last year, one longer than a year. A fair volume of new credit added, which will have some pressure on the account, but not much to do about that now.
Car loan looks good. Keep that on terms for help in scoring.
But the combination of the baddies and the high utilization on the one card is both bringing your score down, and creating the possibility of noise, such as pay down a card, score drop. Given the utilization and baddies, this kind of swing is not predictable, but doesn't mean much. Your score should generally be in a range, based on where you are with utilization.
When those baddies drop, you can expect a boost.
As your utilization goes down, you can create a boost on your own. I'd get the USAA card below 50% as a first step.
@Anonymous wrote:Thank you. I was thinking paying off the lower balances first wouldbe the way to go, but I guess I was wrong
The smaller balances are easier to take care of, and you may get a few points as each of those goes to zero balance. On TU, I see a couple points change as individual smaller value cards go in and out of zero status.
But the largest section of points increases I've gotten so far was when the last of my individual accounts went below 50%, meaning no card was over 50%.
