Credit card paid off but experian score goes down 4 points

[pizzaman1]

Now I just got an alert that my Equifax went up 2 points for that same account My oldest current open account is 3 years I believe.

[Anonymous]

It is very possible that the oldest account has some effect on which scorecard/bucket you're in.  More so than even AAoA, but we just don't have the data points to know.

Changing scorecards with nothing else changing can have a negative or positive effect.  If you're "moving up" in scorecards, you're being compared to people in that score card and it's feasible for a score to go up or down even 10 points, maybe even more.

I wouldn't sweat any change of 10 points either way, when rebuilding.  It's just a fact of how FICO scores profiles in a bucket versus each other moreso than against scores in other buckets.

[pizzaman1]

Ok thank you for your input

[medicgrrl]

I had the same thing happen with my TU score today.  It went down 5 points.  I'm not worried about the points, just find it interesting that I would lose points for going from 4 cards reporting balances to 2 cards.  I've had no other changes either.  

I think I'm going to use this data to experiment over the next few months.  The only other guess I have is that I've got a few accounts that I haven't used in awhile, but none of them are my oldest tradeline, and the score change corresponds with the update in balances changing to $0.

[Anonymous]

You know, that makes me think about it more -- it's feasible that an account you haven't used in awhile actually went from active to inactive and maybe counts against the total number of revolving lines you have.  5 ACTIVE open credit cards more than 24 months old) gives the biggest FICO boost, so technically if you have ONLY 5 accounts and 1 goes inactive for non-use, it could penalize you a little bit...

[medicgrrl]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

You know, that makes me think about it more -- it's feasible that an account you haven't used in awhile actually went from active to inactive and maybe counts against the total number of revolving lines you have.  5 ACTIVE open credit cards more than 24 months old) gives the biggest FICO boost, so technically if you have ONLY 5 accounts and 1 goes inactive for non-use, it could penalize you a little bit...

---

The other thing I'm thinking is that my total utilization dropped below 5%.  Someone else posted not long ago that one of the bureau's liked their utilization above a certain number.  Besides paying off 2 very small balances, I received a CLI on one of those cards...only $300, but may have been enough to kick me below 5% overall.

I think it's been about 6 months since I've used a few of the cards, but I would think if it were something like that it would lower my score at the first of the month.  Should be fun experimenting over the next several months.

[pizzaman1]

My transunion just went up 2 points also from the same account reporting a 0 balance. So I shouldn't worry about it ?

[medicgrrl]

---

@pizzaman1 wrote:
My transunion just went up 2 points also from the same account reporting a 0 balance. So I shouldn't worry about it ?

---

Definitely don't worry about these small changes.  They happen all of the time.  You'll see this often and sometimes you'll know why, other time's it'll be FICO's secret lol  I'm more curious as to why....is there a certain % of cards it likes to see report for some people or a % of utilization.  

[pizzaman1]

Yes interesting. Keep us updated

[Anonymous]

There's a minimum utilization you need to keep?