Keep losing points. Don't understand.

[My_Fako]

Past couple of days my Ex score keeps going down. Not a total of 12/15 points. Only thing that has changed is a few of my cards are now reporting a zero bl. All $0 but have $39 reporting on my Express store card. 

Only thing I can think of, maybe I was rebucketed?

Anyway having my utilization to low. It says I'm using zero on Experian website. But I have $39 out of $23.000 total reporting. 

Anyone?

[gibeon]

It might be due to being under 1% utilization ($230), and it's rounding down to 0.

[Thomas_Thumb]

Really can't determine much based on the limited data. It is possible you dropped below some minimum threshold for aggregate utilization - but some posters only allow $5 to report and it works for them.. Perhaps it is a timing thing or perhaps your store card is being tagged differently than mainstream revolvers from banks.

Try letting more report (on a bankcard preferrably) and see what happens to your score. With Fico scoring models an aggregate utilization in the 4% to 5% range is just as good for scoring as 1% - all else being equal. So, you do have some flexibility on how much you allow to report while maintaining an "optimal" utilization.

Really no need to obsess about utilization, just maintain it is reasonably low.

Back to your score drop - it might not relate to utilization at all. Do you have any new cards reporting, any new inquiries, any cards that went inactive?

[lg8302ch]

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@gibeon wrote:

It might be due to being under 1% utilization ($230), and it's rounding down to 0.

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As soon as there is 1$ reporting it will be 1%, only 0 balance or negative balances report 0 .

[lg8302ch]

What do you have on your reports? Anything that could have updated to show more recent than last cycle ?  If you did not report 0 on all accounts I  would think it is something else that triggered the score drop.  The reason that comes with the alert does not need to be the real reason as the strongest impact will change the score and the reason indicated does not need to be the actual one to drop the score. 

edit: any disputes that were excluded from scoring and now considered again ?

[SouthJamaica]

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@My_Fako wrote:

Past couple of days my Ex score keeps going down. Not a total of 12/15 points. Only thing that has changed is a few of my cards are now reporting a zero bl. All $0 but have $39 reporting on my Express store card. 

Only thing I can think of, maybe I was rebucketed?

Anyway having my utilization to low. It says I'm using zero on Experian website. But I have $39 out of $23.000 total reporting. 

Anyone?

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Obviously the Express store card hasn't reported yet which is why the site is saying you're at zero dollars. When all revolvers are reported at zero, you lose some points. As soon as one card reports a balance you'll be getting those points back.

[Thomas_Thumb]

Good observation

[My_Fako]

The Express account is reporting... ($39) no disputes going on, none of my old ca's are updated etc.  Nothing has changed...  I also got a  score drop,  when one of my majors went from $6 to zero $0. I thought I would see a Increase when everything went to zero but my Express.... 

[My_Fako]

I'm going to let Discover report a small balance, around a $100...  and see if they go back up on the 5th...

Think their treating Express as a charge account?

[Anonymous]

If your Express were being treated as a charge account, then you might well have a true 0.000% in CC utilization since (according to what I have been told) charge accounts do not count toward the U calculation. 

(That's a fairly new piece of "news" to me, since I thought they just used your "high" balance for the credit limit, but it was discussed recently and a number of veterans were confident that charge accounts do not count toward CC utilization.)

Note that when a credit monitoring service says that you have a utilization of X%, that's not necessarily how the FICO algorithm is calculating it.  The "summary" software provided by a typical CMS often rounds to the nearest whole number percent whereas the FICO algorithm itself always rounds up in terms of scoring impact.

Thus a credit card utilization of 9.1% might well get descriibed as "9%" by the myFICO or Karma or CCT "summary" page, when the actual FICO 8 algorithm will treat that as 10%.  Thus, in your case, just because the summary page says 0% doesn't mean necessarily that FICO is treating it as 0%.  If FICO is treating the Express as a true credit card, then your utilization should be rounding up (inside FICOs algorithm) to 1%.