Experian FICO 8 score dropped 26 points

[aircobra]

So I got a notification from Experian that my score dropped 26 points since yesterday (hell, since this afternoon since I signed up for the $1 trial on CCT and my scores hadn't changed since yesterday). I looked over what was reporting and didn't see anything different from earlier. Any reason why this would happen?

[Anonymous]

---

@aircobra wrote:

So I got a notification from Experian that my score dropped 26 points since yesterday (hell, since this afternoon since I signed up for the $1 trial on CCT and my scores hadn't changed since yesterday). I looked over what was reporting and didn't see anything different from earlier. Any reason why this would happen?

---

Can you take another shot at describing the sequence of events?  The text is blue seems to contradict the text in red.

I am guessing that you pulled your scores on a certain day and time (e.g. 3 pm May 10 using CCT) and that at some point after that (e.g. 6 pm May 11, an alert from CCT) you received an alert indicating a score drop on Experian.   Those are just examples. 

All kinds of events on a person's report can cause a 26 point drop.  A person's score can drop by 100 points in ten minutes.

[aircobra]

I pulled my Experian score yesterday and it was 646. Got the trial from CCT this afternoon and it showed the same. Then around 9pm I noticed my score had dropped to 620. I am not seeing anything that would cause the drop.

[Anonymous]

When you say you noticed your score dropped around 9pm, what was your source of the score?  Experian?  Did you receive an alert of the score drop?

If I had to take 3 wild guesses, I'd say that your only credit card with a reported (non-zero) balance just reported $0, or your only installment loan that was almost paid off reported as closed.  Both of those events could result in a score drop around what you referenced.  My third guess would be that your reported utilization increased across a threshold. 

[Anonymous]

I think we can simply what happened to this:

(a)  You enrolled in the CCT $1 trial on May 11 (afternoon). 

(b)  That evening (9 pm) you get an alert mentioning a drop.

BBS is right to ask which credit monitoring product gave you that alert, since you have at least one product besides CCT.

Crucial here is your belief that you have some kind of credit monitoring tool that shows you your absolute latest Experian report (not just the score) with multiple updates to the report each day; and that when you inspected this tool at 9 pm it looked like all your accounts and data were the same as they were in the afternoon.

I'd like to hear BBS comment on that.  There may be tools out there that do that, but you may not have one of them.  In short, when you looked at your report at 9 pm it was showing you the same data as you saw earlier in the day, though very likely something had changed.  The myFICO Ultimate works like that (only one report per month) so does Credit Karma (one per week) even WalletHub does not give you multiple fresh reports in a single day.

[aircobra]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

When you say you noticed your score dropped around 9pm, what was your source of the score?  Experian?  Did you receive an alert of the score drop?

If I had to take 3 wild guesses, I'd say that your only credit card with a reported (non-zero) balance just reported $0, or your only installment loan that was almost paid off reported as closed.  Both of those events could result in a score drop around what you referenced.  My third guess would be that your reported utilization increased across a threshold. 

---

The free credit monitoring that Experian offers. Got an alert of a 26 point drop last night. It looks like a charged-off account updated to show a late payment and also take up some UTI (brought it to 19% from 7%). I guess Experian wasn't correctly showing things prior to the update because charged-off accounts still take up your UTI, right? It hadn't been doing that until last night. "Failed to pay" still counts as a late payment?