debt down, score down!

[907grown]

Paying off credit cards, making huge strides each week. Feeling great! Fico alert today, balance of bank cards dropped 1000.00, transunion score dropped 3 points! Ggrr, I hate you fico!

[Ghoshida]

---

@907grown wrote:
Paying off credit cards, making huge strides each week. Feeling great! Fico alert today, balance of bank cards dropped 1000.00, transunion score dropped 3 points! Ggrr, I hate you fico!

---

Is your current balance zero across all credit cards? If yes, that might be one reason. FICO score is designed in such a way that at least one card should report a balance and ideally less than 10% of the limit.

If not, there might be something else going on.

[Anonymous]

Also, just other changes could have done it. You don't get a notice every time something happens. Other things may have happened that affected the score and the balance change just pushed the alert through. 

[Anonymous]

What sort of silent changes can make a score worse? Usually stuff just aging makes a score better. Balance changes, inquiries, and new accounts notify. What else affects score that you wouldn't see?

[NRB525]

---

@Anonymous wrote:
What sort of silent changes can make a score worse? Usually stuff just aging makes a score better. Balance changes, inquiries, and new accounts notify. What else affects score that you wouldn't see?

---

OP's scores started at 460. OP is rebuilding from some seriously bad times. As the score improves, FICO keeps trying to make sense of all the changed information. There was probably a sequence of fairly rapid score increases recently, and in the latest debt payment, there is some sort of longer term rebalancing of the factors FICO uses to calculate. The score probably went up if the paid item were isolated, but other factors resulted in a lowering of the score more than that increase.