@Anonymous wrote:Were there any other changes to your balances that might cause a drop? I recently got an alert that a new remark was added to an old, but still active, savings account (I still need to pull my annual credit report to see what the new remark is), and then last week my score dropped by 19 points. I assumed the remark must have caused the drop, but it looks like it was actually due to me paying off all of my balances.
I usually have a balance on at least one of my cards by the time the billing cycle ends. I only recently saw that there is a penalty for carrying 0% revolving credit, which is bizzar to me. I guess the credit buerues hate "deadbeats" for never carrying a balance as much as the creditors who never make any interest off us either, lol. I guess I'll just leave a smallish balance on one of my cards at the end of my billing cycle, so it gets reported, and see if the score goes back up.
@Anonymous
The all zero penalty is completely reversible- once a card reports a balance you'll get your points back.
That's what I figured. Still, strange that a zero balance can be so negative, but I suppose it makes some sense if the purpose of the score is to indicate how good you are about managing credit. If it looks like you never use your credit, I guess that would make it harder to predict how well you'll use new credit. I'm a quantiative analyst in structured finance, so I would LOVE to see the credit models FICO uses 
It's good that you see it that way above and understand how it works. Many people cannot move past that 
@Anonymous wrote:It's good that you see it that way above and understand how it works. Many people cannot move past that
^^ true story