Simulators basically are for entertainment and are not accurate. When it comes to FICO vs Vantage. Its 2 entirely different worlds. You will gain points not lose points paying down a loan to 8%. And then keep it open as long as possible until paying it off. Then you lose pts. If thats your only loan. As we say here. Vantage is a FAKO score not a FICO score.
Even if it did. 90%+ of lenders use FICO. Credit Karma is great to keep an eye on your reports for changes. Score wise. Nah. I'm 25-30 pts lower on FAKO than FICO. Some on here have said it can be as high or low as 100 pts.
@Anonymous wrote:Would vantage actually drop?
As noted above Vantage scores are not used for app decision for more than 90% of lenders I'd guess even much less than 10% is using VS to date. Sites that offer VS are valuable because they're free and provide frequent information regarding your account activity. Not useful for monitoring scores. They have a different algorithm/formula than FICO, therefore produce a different score.
Also as suggested above, simulators can't be counted as fact or near fact in most cases. There are more people who's simulator prediction is way off opposed to a smaller number of people who find it even comes close. At least with for my profile and numerous posts here. You'd assume it's looking at your specific data and providing a prediction. They do not appear to take into account the specifics of each persons profile and only provide predictions based on generic information regarding UTL decreases and increases. Generic or maybe average information regarding the impact of a late or other derog. As you may already know, each profile is different.
Yet I still test it occasionally and to date, not convinced of it's accuracy. More so convinced of my statements above.
In addition they only provide predictions for 1 score model and 1 bureau and we know that each FICO score model and bureau reacts a little different or we would all have the same score on all bureaus with identical information.
I actually don't know anyone that's underwriting on VS 3 (which is the score used at Credit Karma). VS4, there's a few now but VS3 was tried a few places and discarded to my knowledge.
I would ask, being greedy, if you're paying down aggressively anyway could you look for a couple of breakpoints? 
Namely, SL's >100% to 98% or similar on the student loans specifically, and then there's another breakpoint somewhere between 60% and 70% aggregate (include auto, mortgage, personal loans too so may not be feasible) utilization, my money is on 66/67 but unfortunately with my mortgage acquisition and doing a refi / new HELOC and probably a massive HELOC draw, I'm just not in a position to play with it even if I got to 69% before the financial market changed to be hugely advantageous for me personally.
