@Anonymous wrote:
Hello, I’m new here and I’m just searching for answers I may be able to find here.
I had a synchrony bank credit card with a $1500 limit that was sitting at about $1100 or so for the past year. ( I understand this is bad now but was completely clueless prior) I had made the minimum payment on this account for the last 2 years on time (automatic withdrawal) so it was always paid, it just had a high balance consistently for some time.
I finally had the means to pay a large chunk of the balance down (paid it down to $250/$1500 as opposed to the $1100/$1500 it had been) and doing so brought my utilization total down under 20% which I though was great. I didn’t close the account out or anything like that. But my score dropped 88 points!!! I know without thoroughly looking at my credit and knowing each and every detail, it’s hard to give a concrete answer to me but is this normal? Should I be concerned? Is it maybe temporary just due to the sudden change?
Long story short, I began this year with a really low score (411-450) and I finally brought it back up to 650 (I know it’s not “perfect” but nearly 200 points in less than 12 months??) I was very proud and then all of a sudden I’m hit like this
No it's absolutely not normal. Yes you should be concerned, something else is going on. There's no way paying a card down from 73% to 16% would do anything other than gain you points in your FICO scores.
Are you sure the score you're looking at is a FICO score?
@Anonymous as @SouthJamaica said, that's absolutely not normal. If this were the sole change to your credit reports, you should see a big boost from paying down that balance once it reported. A few questions:
1.) Which score are you seeing this change on and where are you getting it? VantageScore 3.0 models given by sites such as Credit Karma aren't used by an overwhelming majority of lenders (FICO scores are) and are notoriously unreliable. I have pretty good credit scores and many years of flawless history, but my VS3 scores are often up to 100 points lower than my FICO scores. Meanwhile there are many people who have VS3 scores that can be 100 points higher than their FICO scores, giving them false confidence about their approval odds.
2.) Has enough time passed that the new lower balance has certainly been reported to the credit bureaus?
3.) Are you positive that your limit is still $1500? It's unfortunate, but sometimes when a borrower is deemed risky a lender will reduce the credit line of an account as the balance comes down (balance chasing).
4.) It looks like you've done a great job of improving your scores in a relatively short period of time. Have there been any delinquent accounts that may have reappeared on your credit reports? If you're seeing a drop like that on a real FICO score, there has certainly been some kind of new negative scoring factor introduced.
Many credit cards give free monthly or quarterly FICO scores.
Discover will give anyone a free monthly Experian FICO 08 score at creditscorecard.com
myFICO of course offers a number of credit monitoring services, and CCT offers a $1 trial that will give you all 3 FICO 08 scores.