FICO Causes and Effects (What Happened, and How Did it Affect Your FICO?)

[screen_name]

Odd. Got an alert that one account showed a balance increase - my credit card showed a balance of about $5000 - used it a lot on business travel this month - and score increased to 809 from 780. Do they like balances or not?

[haulingthescoreup]

---

@screen_name wrote:
Odd. Got an alert that one account showed a balance increase - my credit card showed a balance of about $5000 - used it a lot on business travel this month - and score increased to 809 from 780. Do they like balances or not?

---

As a wild guess, here's one possibility: you had a balance increase, but you also had something positive, like an account getting older. (With those scores, I doubt that you had a derog getting older!) There was a gain from the whatever, and a loss from the increased balance, but the net was an increase. Or not.

Odd things happen when scores get as high as yours.

I like your screen name, btw!

[BBYGRL]

As of 4/26/08: Macy's gave me a CLI on two cards - $700 each. CC balances ($2,475) reduced by $300. Two out of 12 cards reporting balance $6 & $2,100.

I have two inquires that are due to fall off my MyFico CRs in May. I don't expect a bump since they are amost a year old.  We'll see.

All of this activity inducted me into the 800 club and EX (edit) is finally showing me some luv.

Message Edited by BBYGRL on 04-26-2008 06:22 PM

[Anonymous]

Here is a case study in a short thin credit file doubling the number of TL in a little over a month.

This month I added a Citi CC and a Macy's store card

Positives over the time period - I lowered revolving util from 19% to 9%

I added a store card which improves my mix scoring

Negatives-

I lowered my average age to about 1 year old

I had balances report on all 3 revolving accounts

Took 2 inquiries and 2 new accounts opened (making 3 within a year as my auto loan ages in 2 weeks)

This gives me plenty of hope of reaching 760 midscore for buying a house in 2-3 years . As I won't add any more accounts and will hope to have my auto loan still open but within 10 months of payoff (so that I don't have to count it in DTI), I will simply cut back using credit a few months before I apply for a mortgage and I will have a halfway respectable average age of 3 years on accounts which will hurt much less.

3/25/08  TU 742  EQ 710  EX 739

4/26/08  TU 725  EQ 733  EX 743

[Anonymous]

I just graduated college a year ago with bad credit. I starting paying all my bills on time for a year and my FICO slowly rose month by month to 618..The same day I made my 5th consecutive student loan payment (and lowering the overall balance) FICO alerted me and also dropped my score to 574. Can someone explain this? At this rate I'll never be able to buy a house someday.

[haulingthescoreup]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

I just graduated college a year ago with bad credit. I starting paying all my bills on time for a year and my FICO slowly rose month by month to 618..The same day I made my 5th consecutive student loan payment (and lowering the overall balance) FICO alerted me and also dropped my score to 574. Can someone explain this? At this rate I'll never be able to buy a house someday.

---

Hi, jonesy, welcome to the forums! Do you have a Sallie Mae graduated payment program?

Message Edited by haulingthescoreup on 05-16-2008 07:11 PM

[Anonymous]

Yes I do. Is that the problem? I thought paying off student loans, no matter how fast or slow you do increase your credit score. Especially if you do it over a longer period of time.

[haulingthescoreup]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

Yes I do. Is that the problem? I thought paying off student loans, no matter how fast or slow you do increase your credit score. Especially if you do it over a longer period of time.

---

They had a one-time (let's hope) screw-up in how they report this.

There's a thread on this same forum where you can read the unfolding mess in real time. Lots of adrenaline there, understandably, as people reacted to 100+ point losses, but if you make it to the end of the thread, you'll see how it's being handled:

*new error in Sallie Mae reporting*

Now that they're getting the fix in (a bit patchy, but it seems to be happening), people are getting their scores back. It was interesting that it looks like the myFICO forums was the first place that people realized this was happening. We were Googling all over when this started Friday before last, trying to find out something, and we seemed to be the only place discussing it.

Anyway, the gist seems to be, call Sallie Mae to make sure that your account has been properly updated.

[marty56]

Droped util from 10% to 4%.  EX is up 16 points.  EQ up 10 points but an INQ went over 1 year old which gives me 2.  TU hasnt reported the util change yet.