Curious score drop

[Anonymous]

Just had a slight score drop I'm trying to understand. My Ex Fico 8 dropped 4 pts with the only changes being revolver balances detailed below.

I'm AU on these

Cap1 - $28/1000 changed to $0/1000

Sam's Club MC - $372/3300 changed to $94/3300

My card

Discover - No change $65/1500

I'm not too terribly upset about 4 points (from 728 to 724). I'm just still trying to learn and this seems to go against what I've read? I wouldn't expect any score change with the above data points. Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

The only way that reducing debt will hurt your score is if you pay every balance you have down to $0. Then you’ll incur a “no credit usage” penalty. Barring that, something else happened to reduce your score and the timing was coincidental.

[sarge12]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Just had a slight score drop I'm trying to understand. My Ex Fico 8 dropped 4 pts with the only changes being revolver balances detailed below.

I'm AU on these

Cap1 - $28/1000 changed to $0/1000

Sam's Club MC - $372/3300 changed to $94/3300

My card

Discover - No change $65/1500

I'm not too terribly upset about 4 points (from 728 to 724). I'm just still trying to learn and this seems to go against what I've read? I wouldn't expect any score change with the above data points. Any ideas?

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Once again, as is often stated, an alertable event happened, which led to a score pull. These are 2 independant and often unrelated pieces of data. Unfortunately Myfico decided to put them in the same place which makes it look like they are related. It appears they will never take action to make that clear so the members here continue to explain this. An alertable event happened and this is your latest score, not this score changed because of the alertable event.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Just had a slight score drop I'm trying to understand. My Ex Fico 8 dropped 4 pts with the only changes being revolver balances detailed below.

I'm AU on these

Cap1 - $28/1000 changed to $0/1000

Sam's Club MC - $372/3300 changed to $94/3300

My card

Discover - No change $65/1500

I'm not too terribly upset about 4 points (from 728 to 724). I'm just still trying to learn and this seems to go against what I've read? I wouldn't expect any score change with the above data points. Any ideas?

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Those balance changes did not cause the score decrease.

[Anonymous]

Ok thanks. To be clear, I'm checking my Experian score on the Experian app while under the $1 trial for the premium product.

I've assumed that the ex score was updated daily in those circumstances.

I guess there's something changed from the last update to this one that I can't see because I've poured over all balances, etc and these are the only changes. Age would change of course but that couldn't cause it.

Hmm, my student loans are currently in an admin forbearance state as I was just approved for an ibr plan. I guess that could cause an effect.

[sarge12]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Ok thanks. To be clear, I'm checking my Experian score on the Experian app while under the $1 trial for the premium product.

I've assumed that the ex score was updated daily in those circumstances.

I guess there's something changed from the last update to this one that I can't see because I've poured over all balances, etc and these are the only changes. Age would change of course but that couldn't cause it.

Hmm, my student loans are currently in an admin forbearance state as I was just approved for an ibr plan. I guess that could cause an effect.

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Changes happen sometimes even when you have done nothing...time elapsed creates changes. Sometimes an alert gets generated while some threshold of time is also crossed...ex AAoA crosses 5 years, inquiry drops off, AooA crosses a threshold etc. Point being we do not know exactly when these thresholds happen, so what appears to be unchanged, might have changes built into the alogorithm that time elapsed creates its own change. I have tried and failed to accurately predict what my scores will be after taking any given action. I have found the speculation to be fruitless, and trying to arrive at conclusions based on what you did, and what your score did can and usually does lead to the wrong conclusions. Paying down all cards except one will not cause a score to go down, and what did would likely prove impossible to find.

[sarge12]

Here is another caveat that inquiring minds might ponder, I have recieved alerts lately due to using a card that had been previously inactive. That leads me to believe that a card being unused for an extended period might mean that account is not being included in some calculations of AAoA, utilization or something. If not, why does it generate an alert? I would be interested if anyone has checked to see if that might be the case.

[SouthJamaica]

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@sarge12 wrote:

Here is another caveat that inquiring minds might ponder, I have recieved alerts lately due to using a card that had been previously inactive. That leads me to believe that a card being unused for an extended period might mean that account is not being included in some calculations of AAoA, utilization or something. If not, why does it generate an alert? I would be interested if anyone has checked to see if that might be the case.

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If you look into it you may find that that was a user-configured alert.

In any event, it's irrelevant, because OP wasn't referring to an alert, but to daily monitoring of EX.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Ok thanks. To be clear, I'm checking my Experian score on the Experian app while under the $1 trial for the premium product.

I've assumed that the ex score was updated daily in those circumstances.

I guess there's something changed from the last update to this one that I can't see because I've poured over all balances, etc and these are the only changes. Age would change of course but that couldn't cause it.

Hmm, my student loans are currently in an admin forbearance state as I was just approved for an ibr plan. I guess that could cause an effect.

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Perhaps you should check EX on a computer, rather than a hand held device; it might be easier to find the culprit.

It could be something not very obvious, like, e.g., an old closed account dropping off.

[HeavenOhio]

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@sarge12 wrote:

Here is another caveat that inquiring minds might ponder, I have recieved alerts lately due to using a card that had been previously inactive. That leads me to believe that a card being unused for an extended period might mean that account is not being included in some calculations of AAoA, utilization or something. If not, why does it generate an alert? I would be interested if anyone has checked to see if that might be the case.

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@sarge12, I'm surprised you're still seeing that alert. The Equifax inactive alert on myFICO was dumped back in February. Are you seeing it on a different service?

At any rate, the alert would have everything to do with fraud protection and nothing to do with scoring. Unless a bank reports payment information (trended data), it's impossible to tell if a card has emerged from a period of inactivity by looking at a single credit report. However, monitoring services would have access to multiple reports. They use that capability all the time when generating alerts.