Possible rebucketing?

[Anonymous]

In the past month or so, I have had some nice cli's.  As a result, my total credit line broke $100k.  Earlier this week, my EX score dropped 9 points. Yesterday, my EQ score dropped 11 points.  TU did the opposite and increased 2 pts. My utilization is 4%.  I have one card reporting and it the only card that has been reporting since November.

There is no reason for the score drop so it made me wonder if I was possibly rebucketed??  How would I know if I was?  I feel like I just went backwards a year.  

[RonM21]

HMMM, that's a good question.  I'd be curious of the true answer to this.

[Anonymous]

It sounds like you are concerned that CLIs could have caused you to move from one FICO 8 scorecard to another ("rebucketing").  This is not possible.  Scorecard assignment is not based on credit limits.

There's a very rare situation where a CLI could conceivably cause you to take a score hit.  This is because some FICO models are reputed (by some people) to ignore any revolving tradeline in the utilization calculation if its CL gets huge enough.  But if this does happen, it would have to be really high.  I think I have heard numbers like 40k or 50k mentioned as conceivable places where this might occur.

So a weird example might be this.  You have two cards, A and B.   A has a 28k limit with a $0 balance.  B has a 1k limit with a $550 balance.  Your total utilization is very small (< 4%) chiefly due to A's huge CL.  But then you get a CLI on card A bring its CL to 51k.  That passes some hidden threshold for FICO and now FICO disregards that tradeline in computing your total utilization.  Suddenly your utilization goes from 2-3% to 55%.

That's all conjecture about something I have heard could be possible (disregard of a CC when its CL gets extremely large).  Maybe that is possible, maybe not.  But even if it were possible, all of your CLs are way below where that threshold could be.

Here's a question for you.  It sounds like you have received "alerts" telling you that your score has changed in a way you weren't expecting.  Have you pulled new versions of your credit reports after getting this surprising news?  If so, have you gone over them with a extremely fine toothed comb to see if there is the slightest thing that could have changed?  Note that even skilled veterans of this site who are very used to pulling their reports many times a year could easily miss a tiny detail in comparing reports from today vs. six weeks ago.  It's an exhausting job and often not worth the effort.  It's often easier just to assume that something did change, not try too hard to figure out what, and just continue to work on the known good credit habits that are under your control -- and assume that in the long game you will be fine.

[Revelate]

I will state that out of the 100's of posts we've had here, literally 99.9% of them weren't rebucketing and simply the reports weren't carefully analyzed enough.

Not saying this is the case here, but bucketing is usually a big event, not 10 points frankly.  I'd be double-checking everything for tradelines disappearing or balance changes or similar.  Nor is 10 points that big of a deal unless you're playing in the dirty buckets for a mortgage.