Equifax balance decrease and a direct massive 29 point Fico drop.

[Anonymous]

Just pulled a complete hard copy of my EQ report on line from EQ website,  as you suggested. Absolutely nothing erroneous or different on this report  ( July)  that was different from June's report except for the natural lower balances on cards as I pay down balances. So the sudden  EQ  29 point drop still  remains an  unexplained mystery. Any ideas why ?

[medicgrrl]

Have you looked at each account individually to see if there are any comments? My sister has one report that has a lower score because there is a derogatory comment, even though the payment history is showing no lates.

[medicgrrl]

Also, look more precisely at the accounts that just updated.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Just pulled a complete hard copy of my EQ report on line from EQ website,  as you suggested. Absolutely nothing erroneous or different on this report  ( July)  that was different from June's report except for the natural lower balances on cards as I pay down balances. So the sudden  EQ  29 point drop still  remains an  unexplained mystery. Any ideas why ?

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Is it possible that some older account(s) aged off? I had the experience with Equifax that it dropped some of my older closed accounts, thus decreasing my (a) age of oldest account and (b) average age of accounts, even though they'd been closed only a year or less than a year.

[Anonymous]

Yes. Checked each account fully on full report. No derogatories. Only one item in the comments box. I disputed something over a year ago. It was resolved satisfactorily. But still shows "cardholder disputes information on account", month after month for over a year now. However it has never lowered my score. So I doubt it is that all of a sudden that caused a 29 point drop..

[Anonymous]

Nope, nothing dropped off from previous reports. Still showing same accounts from month after month.

[atarvuzdar]

Barring any obvious changes I would look to rebucketing as the possible culprit. Your AAoA may have passed a threshold where you're now in an "older" crowd--but you're the low man on the totem pole in that crowd. If not AAoA it could be another criterion which passively changed that caused the rebucketing. Something similar happened to me a couple years ago. My oldest account crossed a threshold and suddenly my peers (as FICO sees it) were a different group of people with different data points.

ETA: I only figured this out because one of my positive indicators (age of accounts is high) moved to being a negative indicator (age of accounts too low).

[Anonymous]

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@atarvuzdar wrote:

Barring any obvious changes I would look to rebucketing as the possible culprit. Your AAoA may have passed a threshold where you're now in an "older" crowd--but you're the low man on the totem pole in that crowd. If not AAoA it could be another criterion which passively changed that caused the rebucketing. Something similar happened to me a couple years ago. My oldest account crossed a threshold and suddenly my peers (as FICO sees it) were a different group of people with different data points.

ETA: I only figured this out because one of my positive indicators (age of accounts is high) moved to being a negative indicator (age of accounts too low).

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Rebucketing is a possibility, though if that is what is going on it won't be the OP's AAoA that triggered it.  Aside from derogs (which can get you into or take you out of a dirty profile) the three factors involved in scorecard assignment are:

Age of Oldest Account

Age of Youngest Account

Total number of accounts

So if you want to explore your rebucketing theory with the OP it would be valuable to find out whether his Age of Oldest Account crossed over an integer value, whether his Age of Youngest crossed over a 6-month, 1-year or 2-year mark, and whether derogs have changed.

[Anonymous]

Excellent. Really good input.Thank you. I feel like we are now beginning to get into the upper echelons of the dark side of Mr. Fair and Mr. Isaac ' s creation when they started FICO all those years ago. Bless their little hearts...lol. So many ulcers they have given the average  American consumer since FICO started!

[Anonymous]

Also did you check to see if some negative information has an updated date, that can cause a score drop.