@cr101 wrote:I can see how paying off all of my cc could lower my score, but how could paying off just some of it lower it? Can someone explain the rationale?
What's even more confusing is that the service that I'm using says that the negative things impacting my score are credit used and available credit.
There is no way in which paying off some of your credit card balance could lower your score.
OP which simulator are you looking at?
@cr101 wrote:
@NRB525 wrote:
OP which simulator are you looking at?capital one credit wise
CreditWise provides your Vantage 3 score, not FICO. Vantage is an entirely different scoring model that doesn't respond to changes in your credit in the same manner as FICO. Your FICO scores will not drop from paying down your balances,
It is odd. But, unfortunately, because Vantage is not used by many lenders to make credit decisions (only Synchrony, I believe, uses it - that we know of), we don't have much data gathered to analyze what makes it tick as we do with FICO. There's possibly a util threshold which, should utilization percentage drop below, triggers a 'lack of debt' penalty in the scoring algorithm - in a similar way FICO penalizes for all zero balances. We just don't know what that threshold is - or if that's even the case really...
To add to all of that Synchrony uses Vantage 4 and Credit Karma uses Vantage 3, both versions of Vantage can result in different scores with the same information, same as FICO is different from both of them which is the most common used score. Different models. Vantage is seldom used for credit decisions. My synchrony score (TU - V4) vs my Credit Karma score (TU - V3) is different, both being 2 different versions of the Vantage model with the same information.
And simulators are mostly unreliable due to an individuals unique credit profile, regardless of how they occasionally come close. You will likely have a better idea of how your score reacts from the many forum members input who study this stuff. I'm not one but a review of hundreds of post, they are always closer to the actual outcome than a simulator.
As some have already noted, there is no way reducing your UTL only (not to $0 and with no other changes) can result in a point loss with FICO scores.
