Major irritation

[Anonymous]

So, my Experian FICO score (as provided by WaMu) has been slowly climbing from the 650 range up to around 680 over the last few years.

Imagine my surprise when, after paying down one of my two credit cards to 0, my score dropped about 130 points to 550.  This is unacceptable.  How is it that paying off debt can impact me to the point where now I won't be able to refinance my mortgage for a lower rate?

I think it's unconscianable to penalize people for wanting to be debt-free....ludicrous! 

[Junejer]

Hello sugardave, and welcome to the forums. Please read Credit Scoring 101, if you haven't already.

The WaMu score is a PFICO and weighs CC activity greater. Your actual FICO might be higher or lower. Unfortunately, you won't know that score without a lender sharing it with you. As of 2/14/09, EX has decided to stop allowing consumer to purchase their FICOs any longer.

I thought that WaMu offered TU for the PFICO. Help, I don't have WaMu, so I may be misremembering.

[haulingthescoreup]

Seems like I remember reading that WaMu usually provided the TU PFICO, but that a very few people got the EX PFICO.

[Junejer]

Arigato HTSU.

[Anonymous]

Ah, you're right...it is TransUnion.  I got confused from the giant banners they have everywhere reminding me that my FICO score wil no longer be available on 3/1...and I correlated that with what I've been reading about Experian being little punks.

Still, after reading the linked information, I still can't understand how paying off the last $60 on a credit card can cause my FICO to drop 129 points. 

[haulingthescoreup]

The problem is, no one really knows how the PFICO ("credit-card enhanced") score works. Well, I suppose you could same the same for the regular FICO scores, but we like to pretend that we understand them.

We do know that the PFICO reacts more strongly to CC-associated changes, but a 60-point drop seems bizarre. The score that you get (or used to get) with your WaMu card was based on the previous month's TU report, so if something odd happened last month, or if that payment hadn't shown up back then, that would reflect in the score.

Another possibility I suppose is that they no longer use PFICO's but TransUnion's TransRisk score or some other FAKO. But that seems unlikely, as they're being swallowed up by Chase next week. Maybe you're the first lucky customer to get a Chase FAKO score?

I'd be nervous enough that I'd want to look at my TU report and see if anything nasty had turned up on it. If you don't currently use a monitoring service, you could maybe sign up for a free trial and take a quick look that way. Otherwise, either get your FICO TU score report here, or buy your full TU consumer report from their website. My stomach's turning flip-flops just thinking about it.