Why would my credit score change twice each month?

[vada61]

I have a membership with freecreditreport.com and I get alerts every time my score changes. Every month it goes up and then down by 19 points. Its been this way for about the last 6 months. Would anyone know why that score changes like this?

I filed for Chapter 7 about 6 1/2 years ago and my score goes back and forth between 679 and 698. These scores change within a week of each other every month.

What is your opinion of FCR.com? I would like some feedback on this as I'm not sure its really telling me anything I don't already know...except that paying the $7.00 every  month gets me a copy of my credit reports whenever I want one.

This is my first post so my aplogies if this sounds like a no brainer to you all. Thanks! Vada61

[LS2982]

Best answer would be overall util. What is it currently? They have different tiers that change your scores when balances update.

[Anonymous]

The scores that you get from any credit monitoring service are all fake so, they are not to be trusted for any reason -- ever.  The reports are fine but, the scores are useless and should always be ignored. 

[vada61]

Since this is all new to me, I'm not sure what overall utilization is. I can tell you that I have used about 50% of my available credit on one card thru Cap 1 and thats all that I owe right now. I just paid off two small cards and I am paying more than the minimum on the Cap 1 card. Does that help any?

[Anonymous]

@LS:  Do the fake scores from credit monitoring services even take utilization into consideration? 

My husband and I use the credit monitoring service from USAA Bank and, I'm not sure that utilization makes any difference with them at all. 

[JonRun]

I used to use freecreditscore.com and it absolutely used utilization.

To the OP, most people say to keep one card with a balance of between 1 and 9% and all others with a zero balance. This is supposed to maximize your scores. I can tell you that my FCR Fako number is about 40 points less than my Experian FICO score.

[vada61]

@JonRun...so my score with freecreditreport.com is really higher than what my FICO is? That doesn't sound good. I looked at creditkarma.com and they list my open credit card utilization as 26%. That number seems pretty low-they gave me a grade of B. So I want to find out my FICO which I haven't done as I'm being a cheap skate and don't want to pay for it and I'm partially scared to see what its going to tell me (I know...wimpy wimpy wimpy)

[DaveSignal]

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@vada61 wrote:

@JonRun...so my score with freecreditreport.com is really higher than what my FICO is? That doesn't sound good. I looked at creditkarma.com and they list my open credit card utilization as 26%. That number seems pretty low-they gave me a grade of B. So I want to find out my FICO which I haven't done as I'm being a cheap skate and don't want to pay for it and I'm partially scared to see what its going to tell me (I know...wimpy wimpy wimpy)

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The FAKO scores, at least in my own experience, are often lower than my FICO score.  CreditKarma gives me less than a year AAoA because it only includes open accounts and I just opened a bunch of new accounts.... so my CK score tanks.  FICO still has my average above 5 years though.  Good thing nobody uses the CK score.