So I get a random MyFico alert today that my TU score has gone up. I'm excited thinking that maybe my Alliant SSL loan has posted. Click the alert and it's a pretty significant jump...
Of course no 3B reports yet (still 6 days away, lol) so I have no idea what it is.
Decide to poke into the reasons for my score section and the only thing that changed? It says I am using 0% of my credit. Which is incorrect because not only did Williams Sonoma post with a $5 balance, but my new Capital One card decided to post a $13 balance without my realizing I had a statement cut before my first due date, AND I purposefully posted a $113 balance (out of $2500) on my Discover to test out derogatory scorecards with one, two and three cards reporting. Of course, I got a new Amazon store card last week and the $114/$400 purchase I made posted instantly on the report the day after I was approved for the card.
So now my score jumps up to supposedly 654 WITHOUT my Alliant SSL even reporting yet for credit mix purposes. Which means when the bureaus actually report my credit usage, it'll fall but it'll take me a few months to figure out how to get it back considering balances on a derogatory profile don't matter as much as a clean one.
No data points here to share because I'm confused enough by this CB error in tradeline usage reporting.
Also, this is on a profile with 1 unpaid tax lien ($1000ish), 1 very recent 2017 collection unpaid ($800ish), and an artificial AAoA of 59 months which will drop to way way way less in 1-2 months when Chase FU and Alliant SSL report and my 10+ year old positive closed CC falls off.
I swear if it wasn't for the knowledge that my repairs are working, I'd dump monitoring. Too bad it's too expensive to create a useful monitoring service or I bet all of us could make a fantastic one that actually makes sense...
At least I'm that much closer to the 680 score that will get me another insurance repricing to save a few bucks.
I guess I started April 10th or so with CCT showing a 570 FICO 08 on TU, so moving up 84 points in 2 months isn't bad. Here's to 700s before year's end so I can get closer to that CSP/CSR other than 5/24, but I'm hopeful for an in-branch preapproval by 2018 at some point.
Look in the web interface, on the alert with TU you should get reason codes for the "Your FICO Score increased from X to Y" variety of alerts.
- SCORE FACTORS
- The following represents the factors most impacting your FICO Score
- Number of accounts with delinquency.
- Length of time accounts have been established.
- Length of time revolving accounts have been established.
- Proportion of loan balances to loan amounts is too high.
That's the one for installment utilization being north of 9% or whatever when we're talking FICO 8 in the direct from TU reason codes (MF appears to reword them a little bit in their interface) for example.
Anyway if you're lucky to have a busy enough file to generate this type of event frequently, you can compare reason codes from one to the next and figure out changes on the report over time.
Why not check a CK report or similar if it's available?
Also I hate to say this, but take all the stuff MF / CK / CCT (or fluff) gives as interpretation with a grain of salt; score shifts and reason codes are the gold standard for analysis.
I like having the alerts.
I wish there more of them, that they were more uniform across all 3 bureaus, and that when there was a score change there would be some indication of what caused the change.
@Anonymous wrote:
Oh I know to ignore their alert reasons. The only thing that's obvious is they assumed I had $0 balance on all CCs which was untrue. Obviously something goofed during their CB pull so I can throw away that score as untrue.
I have to start with a clean cycle this month so I'm going to restrict some usual charges before statement cut so they don't accidentally post on statement date. These $13, $5 and $114 balances are mocking me. In July I will start with one account only at $5 and in August I will do one account at 35% and see if there's any score change. That is assuming my lien doesn't drop off, etc.
I'm flatly confused bud 
Where are you seeing you're at $0, are we talking report, or a FICO score, or some random interpretation where frankly the coding isn't reference to the algorithm and this is true with FICO Consumer too. Vis a vis every product out there says I'm at 0% utilization when of course, I have non-zero balances except when I am testing. Small numbers divided by 145,000 or whatever they calculate for my aggregate revolving CL, rounds to zero. Ain't no big thing and means nothing.
The score comes from the bureau when we're talking MF, sure there's been some wonkiness from TU in particular over time, but even when the report data is munged the score is generally accurate (caching in secondary datasets which apparently has occurred with the TU monitoring not-withstanding, wasn't seen in the full pulls).
I didn't catch an all zeros balance reason code direct from TU, but you also state you got a random increase and not certain what vs. all zeros is a known and well characterized penalty, but MF's translation / reword is simply:
4. There are no recent balances on your revolving and/or open-ended accounts.
For FICO 04/9, that's strange I don't see that reason code on TU FICO 8 or industry options during my testing apparently, took a drop but guess it didn't make the grade when I still had a tax lien, late payments, and various flavors of short credit history.
Well whatever the $0 balance glitch was yesterday all the balances reposted today but no change in score.
Will need a new report from one of the free sites to figure out if some derog dropped off for that boost.
