TU score dropped 9 points because.....
I PIF'd everything this month. DOH!!! :lol: I had a $9 balance reporting last month.
There are no recent balances on your revolving credit accounts.
Your credit report shows no recent balances on your revolving accounts. Your FICO score was hurt because you are not currently demonstrating active revolving credit management.
But wait!!! This is a positive factor listed on my TU report:
You've shown recent use of credit cards.
Your FICO score evaluates your mix of credit cards, installment loans and mortgages. People who demonstrate responsible use of different types of credit are generally less risky to lenders. You helped your FICO score by showing recent use of a credit card.
Yeah I'm not worried about it, I just thought it was kind of funny how they can give contradictory statements like that. 
Even worse, when you buy a score from them, they don't list anything bad, but then when you apply for a loan, they tell the lender falsehoods like "balances on revolving accounts are too high". Happened to me, total revolving balance TEN BUCKS due to PIF-before-statement on all but one account, 0.0333% of total credit limit. I started explaining to the LO how it was totally false, she just said "Ya know, I don't think I've ever seen a credit report that didn't have that kind of nonsense in it. I just look at the score." So why they seem to want to sabotage you I don't know, but at least the LOs probably know it's bogus.
Starting Score: EQ 804 - (April 2009) 
Thanks for the comprehensive explanation, Hauling. On my score reports, where the negatives are supposed to appear, I'm getting this: "there are no actionable negative factors present with your score." These are the scores I said I "buy from them", meaning either directly from FICO or via a CRA, usually EQ where they sometimes give me discounts.
But I didn't realize that negative statement were being reported to lenders (but not to me) until I applied for a mortgage recently and received copies of the credit reports that were sent to the lenders. It's annoying enough that negatives were being reported without prior disclosure to me, so that I had no chance to contest them. I'm very glad to have your referral to myfico.com/12 to see them all. (I remember seeing some such URL on this forum in the past, in fact, but couldn't find it when my interest was caught by recent events.) I'll take a look.
But what really puts me in Heartburn City about this is how totally false the reported negatives are. As you say, everyone has negatives. I know there are plenty of negative comments that could be made about me, like I'm one of those boomers everyone loves to hate and -- much worse -- "he still misses the Sixties"! But "amount owed on revolving accounts is too high" just doesn't fit. Ten dollars out of a reported thirty thousand CL (counting AmEx as zero, of course) just can't be too high.
And yes, I'm not as young as I was when I got my first credit card, a pre-Visa "Bankamericard", but somehow I still have that account, many cards and over 35 years later. Yet I got a negative comment about an "“insufficient length of credit history”.
When you say, "they carry so little weight that they really don't do any damage", I think you're referring to the impact on the score, right? I was glad to see the recent credit reports to lenders showed pretty good scores, in line with, or better than, the scores reported directly to me. But I was concerned that the scores might be torpedoed by the negative comments. At least one LO didn't seem to take them seriously, but I still wonder about others.
I'll let you know what I get from myfico.com/12 .
I posted on another thread that negatives for those with scores in the 800's is like saying that (insert name of most attractive person in the world here) has a crooked left fourth toe. Well yes, the toe's a little off center, but who cares?
The scoring formula is like a checklist applied to your reports. It's pretty much always going to find something, but it's the equivalent of that slightly crooked toe.
That's interesting about the insufficient credit history negative. What's your AAoA? Maybe it's shorter than what normally goes with a 35-year-old longest history. I used to get that with 21 years/ 4 years AAoA, but now that I've staggered up to 5y AAoA, that one's gone away, or to be more accurate, it has probably dropped down to where it no longer displays. And I'm too cheap to buy a /12 report!
Lenders see the negatives on reports like yours, but they're familiar with the phenomenon. It shouldn't cause any real-world problem. Your scores are as high as they need to be to get optimum financing, so although it's maddening, it might just be one of those things in modern life where we roll our eyes and go on.
In the meantime, none of us are sure whether any of the three scores actually go as high as 850. Your head might be bumping against the ceiling now!
In the meantime, we boomers have to hang in there. Those X-er's and Y-er's are starting to circle around! 
@haulingthescoreup wrote:I posted on another thread that negatives for those with scores in the 800's is like saying that (insert name of most attractive person in the world here) has a crooked left fourth toe. Well yes, the toe's a little off center, but who cares?
The scoring formula is like a checklist applied to your reports. It's pretty much always going to find something, but it's the equivalent of that slightly crooked toe.
That's interesting about the insufficient credit history negative. What's your AAoA? Maybe it's shorter than what normally goes with a 35-year-old longest history. I used to get that with 21 years/ 4 years AAoA, but now that I've staggered up to 5y AAoA, that one's gone away, or to be more accurate, it has probably dropped down to where it no longer displays. And I'm too cheap to buy a /12 report!
Lenders see the negatives on reports like yours, but they're familiar with the phenomenon. It shouldn't cause any real-world problem. Your scores are as high as they need to be to get optimum financing, so although it's maddening, it might just be one of those things in modern life where we roll our eyes and go on.
In the meantime, none of us are sure whether any of the three scores actually go as high as 850. Your head might be bumping against the ceiling now!
In the meantime, we boomers have to hang in there. Those X-er's and Y-er's are starting to circle around!
I admire your attitude, would be hard for me to emulate. If I were that most attractive person, it would matter to me whether my toe really was crooked or not. Silly, huh? People tell me I take things too seriously. My eyes roll a lot when I read people's experiences posted on this site!
My true AAoA is 15 years, 6 months, but due to scoring foolishness it's reported as 19 yr 11 mo. I posted about this on the Credit Card forum ("Lost or Stolen Card: NOT") and you were kind enough to comment.
At least we have a name for our generation, instead of just a letter. Then again, maybe instead of Gen-Z, history will call them "Depression Babies" -- like my parents. Sure hope not.
Thanks.
Duke-of-Earl wrote:
haulingthescoreup wrote:I posted on another thread that negatives for those with scores in the 800's is like saying that (insert name of most attractive person in the world here) has a crooked left fourth toe. Well yes, the toe's a little off center, but who cares?
The scoring formula is like a checklist applied to your reports. It's pretty much always going to find something, but it's the equivalent of that slightly crooked toe.
That's interesting about the insufficient credit history negative. What's your AAoA? Maybe it's shorter than what normally goes with a 35-year-old longest history. I used to get that with 21 years/ 4 years AAoA, but now that I've staggered up to 5y AAoA, that one's gone away, or to be more accurate, it has probably dropped down to where it no longer displays. And I'm too cheap to buy a /12 report!
Lenders see the negatives on reports like yours, but they're familiar with the phenomenon. It shouldn't cause any real-world problem. Your scores are as high as they need to be to get optimum financing, so although it's maddening, it might just be one of those things in modern life where we roll our eyes and go on.
In the meantime, none of us are sure whether any of the three scores actually go as high as 850. Your head might be bumping against the ceiling now!
In the meantime, we boomers have to hang in there. Those X-er's and Y-er's are starting to circle around!
I admire your attitude, would be hard for me to emulate. If I were that most attractive person, it would matter to me whether my toe really was crooked or not. Silly, huh? People tell me I take things too seriously. My eyes roll a lot when I read people's experiences posted on this site!
My true AAoA is 15 years, 6 months, but due to scoring foolishness it's reported as 19 yr 11 mo. I posted about this on the Credit Card forum ("Lost or Stolen Card: NOT") and you were kind enough to comment.
At least we have a name for our generation, instead of just a letter. Then again, maybe instead of Gen-Z, history will call them "Depression Babies" -- like my parents. Sure hope not.
Thanks.
How I think of negatives is, reasons why the score is less than 850; unless a person has the nearly-mythical 850 there are going to be at least a few dings, but as others have noted a lender looking at a prime credit score is unlikely to care about those dings. And for mortgages, above around 780 or so additional points make little difference because at that level default risk is not the biggest risk facing the lender any more, maturity risk is much more of a concern. With a long term fixed rate loan, the borrower gets to choose when the loan is refinanced, not the lender. So when rates drop, lenders get a lot of loans paid off and when rates rise they get people sitting on those now-cheap loans. For instance my parents bought my childhood home in a time of low inflation and low interest rates (the 1960s) but then came a time of very high inflation (the 1970s) and by the time they sold the place in the 1980s the fixed payments on that mortgage were very cheap because their value had been inflated away. Prudent mortgage lenders will therefore sell bonds to match their mortgage portfolio, with terms that include the right to pay them off if and when the underlying mortgages get paid off. But the market rate of return on bonds that could get paid off early is higher because investors are being asked to accept maturity risk. One of the ways Fannie and Freddie got into big trouble in years leading up to the Great Crash was by covering their mortgage portfolio with fixed-term debt because that lowered the interest rates they had to pay but squeezed them with maturity risk when the Fed cut interest rates and lots of borrowers refinanced.
My parents grew up in the Great Depression and my father served in the Second World War; even today their attitudes about money are noticeably different from those of us boomers. And I notice people younger than me think in ways that differ from how I think, because for instance when I was an undergraduate it was extremely rare for somebody under 21 to have credit cards (I got my first card, AMEX, shortly after graduating).
I fully expect those who are now children and teenagers will also show permanent effects from the current economic situation. In many ways a person's whole life is colored by his or her formative experiences. My own childhood was virtually free of economic worry because my father was a college professor and by the time I first noticed the world of dollars he had tenure. We knew we'd never get rich (and an academic family's social world is full of people with much more money), but we also knew we'd never be poor.