Score has dropped twice and yet no changes on credit report

[prim2007]

I need a better explanation then the generic one provided by myFico that says this:

"There was a change on your credit report that lowered your score but did not trigger an alert. For example, the balance on an account might have increased enough to lower your score, but not enough to trigger a balance increase alert or You moved from one category of credit users to another as time passed..."

I can see no changes related to balances or anything else in the past 3 months, only an address change yet my score has dropped twice over a 3 month period.  I'm still in the higest credit category but just barely now. Tthis is discerning when your score keeps going down and nothing is changing.

Can someone tell me how I can learn more about why this is happening?  There has to be a specific calculation.

[Anonymous]

How much has it dropped?

Bear in mind fluctuations in the 3-5 point range are pretty much the standard level of "noise" in FICO scoring, and aren't a sign anything terrible is happening.

[MidnightVoice]

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TheNewWorldMan wrote:
How much has it dropped?

Bear in mind fluctuations in the 3-5 point range are pretty much the standard level of "noise" in FICO scoring, and aren't a sign anything terrible is happening.

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Mine is fluctuating randomly between 772 and 790+, and has been for 6 months

[prim2007]

I received an alert that it dropped 7 points which sounds like a lot.

[haulingthescoreup]

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@prim2007 wrote:

I need a better explanation then the generic one provided by myFico that says this:

"There was a change on your credit report that lowered your score but did not trigger an alert. For example, the balance on an account might have increased enough to lower your score, but not enough to trigger a balance increase alert or You moved from one category of credit users to another as time passed..."

I can see no changes related to balances or anything else in the past 3 months, only an address change yet my score has dropped twice over a 3 month period. I'm still in the higest credit category but just barely now. This is discerning when your score keeps going down and nothing is changing.

Can someone tell me how I can learn more about why this is happening? There has to be a specific calculation.

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It sounds like you're in a new score bucket. Did an old baddie fall off, or has your overall or average credit age perhaps gotten older?

We are divided into different score "buckets", sharing common characteristics with other consumers. So there's a bucket for people brand new to credit, another for those who have one or more collections, a third for those with public judgements, and so forth. I added onto my husband's nice old Discover card to mooch some history and lost 15 points, because suddenly I was being compared to those with long credit history, and I looked pretty shabby.

The good news is that my scores recovered in 4-6 weeks (sounds like forever now, I know) and since have gone much, much higher. After the initial pain, this allows your scores to grow even higher, because your new bucket has a higher ceiling.

If we all started out competing on an equal footing with psychic and Scout and MidnightVoice and the others, we'd all be mired in the 300's forever, or at least until they finally died off. That would be sort of a brutal way of increasing one's scores!

[smallfry]

So hauling you are done with the rebucketing dragging down your scores already? Congrats.

[haulingthescoreup]

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@smallfry wrote:
So hauling you are done with the rebucketing dragging down your scores already? Congrats.

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Oh, Lord, yes. My EQ was 651 when I got re-bucketed, dropped to 636. This was in October. In February, before my app frenzy, EQ was 728, TU was 734, and EX was 752. So this was in less than 4 months.

Now I'm back in a new bucket, as best as I can tell, after dropping my average age by an impressive degree.