@Anonymous wrote:That is just how the Transunion alerts come in, without too much detail. The TU alerts I've received have either reflected a change in balances, or a score change with a list of factors. The alerts for the other bureaus are more detailed but sometimes the event triggering the alert is not the event that caused the score change. None of the detailed explanations of myFICO alerts that I have received from any of the bureau have related to the absence of an account, only to changes to accounts still on the file.
(It seems that the technology for generating the alerts is proprietary to the individual credit bureaus -- not myFICO -- and each one uses a different system.)
As other posters have suggested, a careful look at the whole TU credit file is the best way to pin down the cause. If you have an older TU report saved or in hardcopy you can do a before-and-after comparison. In addition to a free weekly TU report from creditkarma.com, you can get the TU report weekly from mybankrate.com at no charge. If you are a Capital One cardholder you can also access it weekly through their free CreditWise service... if you sign up for all three and stagger them throughout the week you can have a look at your TU report roughly every other day while you are in the application process. You can also pull the full disclosure for each bureau for free once a year at the government mandated site, annualcreditreport.com.
If this is inconvenient, or you are unable to readliy locate the needle in the haystack of credit data, you might be able to infer a bit by comparing the last TransUnion score alert to this one. The score alerts come with a list of the factors inhibiting your score, and by comparing these factors and the order they appear in the two alerts, you just might be able to deduce the type of change affecting the score.
Good luck with your scores.
That's a very good point you make about the list of factors inhibiting your score.
When I tried my little experiment of letting all revolving balances report at zero, I got a TU score decrease notice, and hidden away in the 'factors' is one I've never seen before: "No recent bank/national revolving balances".
