Refinanced my car, scores went down

[dlister70]

A couple weeks ago, I refinanced my car loan from Sept 2016 and got a much better rate.

When May rolled over, the loan started reporting and I got alerts from Mint and Credit Karma that my scores had dropped.

My score dropped 50 points on those sites, but I know it's not a Fico score.  I'm waiting on my Discover scorecard to tell me my Fico 8 Transunion score to see how bad it really is since that's the score that the credit union pulled.

Both Credit Karma and Mint show my credit age now as 1 year 2 months which appears to be the thing hurting the score the most, but that's just the active accounts, and I have quite a few closed accounts dating back almost 20 years.  I refinanced my house a couple years ago, so instead of having 12 or 13 years of age, I've only got 2 years on that. 

Doesn't the Fico score take into consideration the closed accounts too when figuring your credit age?  I'm assuming that the real change won't be that bad, but I was a little freaked out that the Credit Karma score dropped so much.

[sarge12]

It is not only AAoA that was affected by the refinance...it is also the balance of existing loans as a percentage of original loan amount. On the auto it is now 100%, and the house refinance would also be high because of the recent refinance. It is sort of like utilization on credit cards, and the scores will recover as you pay down the balances. Also this will hurt the part about new accounts as well as inqueries. You can't go by creditkarma, but there will be a notable hit on the fico as well.

[Thomas_Thumb]

Fico and VantageScore both take closed accounts into consideration when looking at AAoA. It's just CK that does not with their internal display.

A refi loan takes balance to loan ratio, B/L, back to 100% which can drop score quite a bit if the loan had been paid down significantly. VantageScores may penalize score more than Fico but, Fico 8 scores drop as well. Some negative factors dragging down score are: The new account with limited payment history and the new (high) installment utilization.