@Anonymous wrote:Recent Transunion report shows I paid my AMEX bill like normal and my credit unitlization dropped from 31% to 26% causing my scores on both Experian and Transunion to drop by roughly 70 points. Its a regualr Amex Charge card PIF every month. Any idea why lowering the utilization would also cause the scores to decrease? Whats alos funny is my wife is an autorized user on the account and when her scores updated they went up by an average of 45 points.
The lower utilization didn't cause your scores to drop.
Your payment likely triggered an alert; when an alert is issued they show you your current score.
Something else changed in your profile between alerts that didn't trigger an alert.
To best figure out what that change is/was, you'll need to compare credit reports from before the change and after the change.
A 70 point drop sounds like a collection or charge-off recently updated.
@Anonymous wrote:Recent Transunion report shows I paid my AMEX bill like normal and my credit unitlization dropped from 31% to 26% causing my scores on both Experian and Transunion to drop by roughly 70 points. Its a regualr Amex Charge card PIF every month. Any idea why lowering the utilization would also cause the scores to decrease? Whats alos funny is my wife is an autorized user on the account and when her scores updated they went up by an average of 45 points.
1. Transunion report doesn't show FICO scores, unless it's a report from MyFICO.
2. Dropping utilization from 31% to 26% would NEVER cause a score drop in any FICO scoring model, and in most if not all scoring models would cause a score INCREASE.
3. An Amex charge card is not factored into FICO utilization at all, except to a limited extent on some of the older scoring models.
So you need to first be sure you're talking about an actual score drop in a FICO score, and then you need to find out what really caused the score drop, because it certainly was not the drop in utilization.
