Within the past 3 days my EX score dropped 13 points and my TU score 12 points for reasons that are baffling me. Three things happened just prior to these drops: 1) a mortgage payment was reported and was on time, so the principal was lower than it had been the previous month; 2) during this past month, I made sure that all my credit card balances were zero, so that when the statement day came, all were zero; and 3) my mortgage company restarted the reporting process, but only showed payments going back to the first of this year, instead of the 7 years that I have been paying (all on time, never late). I had contacted them last week because reports had not been showing up on my EQ report. They said they would issue a request that reports go to all 3 credit bureaus. When they did, they only reported payments beginning with Jan 2017.
I contacted TU who informed me that they only report Vantage Scores, so if I had a concern about the FICO score (even though it is a "TU FICO score," I need to contact FICO (who calculates the FICO score based on their data). So I spoke with a very congenial FICO rep about my problem. She said that paying off my balances so that all were zero on statement issue date was hurting my score. Further, she said that it is best to carry a balance of around 10%+- on all credit cards. The second problem I had was too few credit cards to begin with. FICO uses "The number of accounts being paid as agreed" as part of their scoring. If you have too few (as in too few cards to begin with), this will impact your score. If you do not have a balance for the credit card company to report, they likely will not report that month, so even though you have hundreds of credit cards, it is possible that none will will report if you have no balance, so you would have "0 accounts being paid as agreed."
Her advice seems to be at odds with most of the advice I have seen in other places (except for the number of credit cards), and I would like to know if what she told me is correct?
I also contacted EX and was informed that legally they cannot tell me why my score dropped. I have to get a copy of my report (with a report number via the offline reporting, not the kind I can get on line), review it and dispute any errors I find. And he then said he will snail mail me a copy of my report.
Seems that when your score takes a big drop someone should be able to explain to you exactly what caused it. Since these scores have such a far-reaching affect on our financial lives, there should be a law requiring these score keepers to do so!
