Your mix of credit changed. If this is your only installment loan, by paying it off(which is a good thing), your scores go down because you no longer have an installment loan.
Sorry to hear about your score drop, and I feel your pain! I know the whole mix thing is important, but my score was higher before my new auto loan. I had credit cards and a mortgage reporting and my score dropped 32 points when I opened a new credit card and initiated an auto loan. So apparently you can't win. 
Vehicle loans unfortunately are apparently muy bueno under FICO 8; I took an 18 point drop when my auto loan closed and I had other installment loans though they're reporting as OTHER on Equifax. Not certain that makes a difference or not. My score hasn't recovered even with several card balances paid off and held constant, so I'm assuming the drop from 708 to 690 was explicitly the car loan being paid.
Not happy but that's the breaks I guess. My Beacon 5.0 didn't budge an inch, so I think FICO 8 might be counting stuff a little differently at least on Equifax.
@disdreamin wrote:Weird, thing is, I had no auto loan at all for about a year (although I did have a mortgage...perhaps that helps?) and my FICO 08 scores were pretty darn good. I wasn't really farming or watching utilization or whatnot, just doing my thing. So I can't quite figure out what this scoring models values. Clearly it doesn't like new lines, but it also doesn't like losing them either. Weird!
Yeah I don't know either, FICO 8 isn't behaving similarly to FICO 4 or maybe our data sucks which is possible.
I may have stumbled into a situation starting next week where I might as well go get a mortgage right now, and if that happens I'm going to be very interested what my score does when the mortgage tradeline hits the report.
@Anonymous wrote:I have seen this quite a few times lately. I won't let my husband pay his car off and he only owes $1,500 lol We want to get a house soon and I don't want the drop in score to hurt our chances or interest rates. What I don't understand is if you close a credit crd account, it stays on your report for 10 years and supposedly doesn't hurt but pay off a bigger loan and it kills you!
Mix of credit: different animal than revolving utilization. If you closed all your credit cards you'd see a massive drop on a FICO 8 model from what we've seen. FICO 8 seems to really want open accounts, which is rather irritating but oh well, guess mortgages became even more important for long-term credit building /sigh.
@Revelate wrote:Vehicle loans unfortunately are apparently muy bueno under FICO 8; I took an 18 point drop when my auto loan closed and I had other installment loans though they're reporting as OTHER on Equifax. Not certain that makes a difference or not. My score hasn't recovered even with several card balances paid off and held constant, so I'm assuming the drop from 708 to 690 was explicitly the car loan being paid.
Not happy but that's the breaks I guess. My Beacon 5.0 didn't budge an inch, so I think FICO 8 might be counting stuff a little differently at least on Equifax.
I'll let you know what happens when my trade in reports as paid and my new auto loan hits the CR...
@TRC_WA wrote:
@Revelate wrote:Vehicle loans unfortunately are apparently muy bueno under FICO 8; I took an 18 point drop when my auto loan closed and I had other installment loans though they're reporting as OTHER on Equifax. Not certain that makes a difference or not. My score hasn't recovered even with several card balances paid off and held constant, so I'm assuming the drop from 708 to 690 was explicitly the car loan being paid.
Not happy but that's the breaks I guess. My Beacon 5.0 didn't budge an inch, so I think FICO 8 might be counting stuff a little differently at least on Equifax.
I'll let you know what happens when my trade in reports as paid and my new auto loan hits the CR...
Actually I'm really looking forward to seeing that information! I don't think it mattered under earlier versions but we've always theorized there were different strata of installment loans and this may be pretty good proof of that.