Credit Score dropping daily..:-(

[Anonymous]

Definitely remove yourself from being an AU on that card. The scoring model seems to be factoring in that 89% utilization. 89% is essentially considered as maxed-out. If you stick to the 1-5% utilization on that card, your score will get a 11-20 point bounce once picked up by the bureaus. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

Overmedicated, your last question is the question I've always asked myself: why is EXPERIAN scores so much lower, even when you have identical data across the board. Also, EXPERIAN is always used as the middle score-- which from my many experiences, it's always the LOWEST score that mortgage lenders use to try and set the highest rate.
Is their a possible reason why EXPERIAN always fall in the middle?

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
It may seem counterintuitive but, never pay off your cards to ZERO balances OR have your cards idling at zero balances--at least for over 4 month period. If you are applying for a mortgage make sure none of your revolving credit lines go over 1-5 % credit utilization. These mortgage companies do rescoring--From past experience they're generally on-the-money. Since you're going to be applying for a mortgage soon: make sure there are no open DISPUTES on your file and keep $1.00 balance on all cards just around the time when the lender is going to do a hard pull. I got a 30-point boost when I was trying to do a refinance with Quicken.

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Nice advice, buddy.  Good job helping our OP out.

Here are some important tweaks to it:

*  You are right that all cards at $0 harms the FICO score.

*  You are right that in the runup to the mortgage he should make sure that he's using all his cards, and as you mention it could be for just a single small purchase (or a bigger one is fine too).  The goal here is to make sure that all of them have been classified as active.

*  Having all cards reporting a positive balance at the time he does his preapproval is actually nonideal.  That also harms his score.  It harms the EQ mortgage score especially, though it harms all three scores.  Instead, our OP wants all his cards to report zero except one, with the remaining card reporting the small positive balance.  (We recommend $5 here on the forums, since tiny balances like $1 are occasionally reported as $0 by some issuers.)

[iv]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Overmedicated, your last question is the question I've always asked myself: why is EXPERIAN scores so much lower, even when you have identical data across the board.

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...they don't?

There are plenty of people for whom Experian is their highest score. In very general terms, about a third of people have any particular CRA as their lowest score on a particular scoring model - there is not a CRA-wide weighting (except at the very top/bottom of the ranges, where the CRAs can have slightly different minimums/maximums.)

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@Anonymous wrote:
Also, EXPERIAN is always used as the middle score-- which from my many experiences, it's always the LOWEST score that mortgage lenders use to try and set the highest rate.

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No.

By definition, the middle score for mortgages is whichever of the three scores in the EQ5/TU4/EX2 set is NOT the highest OR the lowest.

You can't claim that Experian is both always lower than the others AND that it is always the middle score...

Again, there are about a third of people who have each CRA as their middle mortgage score.

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@Anonymous wrote:
Is their a possible reason why EXPERIAN always fall in the middle?

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It doesn't.

It seems that you are misunderstanding the "middle score" concept for mortgages, and extrapolating your specific scoring ranges (where, I assume, Experian is your lowest) to all people, which just doesn't work.

[Anonymous]

Oh wow, great Information. Thank you!