This doesnt make sense at all -- Equifax drops 20

Question

I know this has been discussed in the past regarding how score changes do not correlate directly with alerts.. But I can't understand for the life of me why this just happened.. I have the MyFico 3B monitoring.. I just refreshed my reports I have no negatives on my report at all..  I just paid for a new pull of 3 reports on 6/29.  As expected, my score did not change over what monitoring was saying - and my simulator values updated accordingly. Over the past several months, I have made significant reductions in my utilization, which is the only thing that was hurting my score. Since the 29th, this is what happened -- all on Equifax. No changes on TU or Experian -- but the same account changes were alerted with no score changes for them: 6/29/2015 Equifax 713 (+2):Your FICO score has increased from 711 to 713 6/30/2015 Equifax 706 (-7):The balance on one of your accounts has decreased by $79 / The balance on one of your accounts has decreased by 100% 7/2/2015 Equifax 705 (-1):The balance on one of your accounts has decreased by $1491 / The balance on one of your accounts has decreased by 22% 7/3/2015 Equifax 704 (-1):A new account has been added to your credit report (NMAC Auto Lease, 36M, Pays as agreed, first reported 6/1/2015) 7/4/2015 Equifax 704 (0):The balance on one of your accounts has decreased by $22   7/5/2015 Equifax 684 (-20):An account listed on your credit report has been updated (Ford Motor Credit, Auto Lease, Closed or Paid Account, Pays as agreed, Balance $4715 to $0)  Any ideas what could have caused this?  Also, while my TU and Experian have either stayed the same in reponse to balance reductions, or gone up by 1 point at a time, Equifax is dropping and I dont know why. Thanks        

Answer 1

RickNY wrote:
Also, as a reference -- here is my overview: CREDIT HISTORY 18 Years 18 Years 18 YearsTOTAL ACCOUNTS 23 32 27CURRENT ACCOUNTS 23 32 27PAST DUE ACCOUNTS 0 0 0REVOLVING ACCOUNTS 15 20 18INSTALLMENT ACCOUNTS 8 12 7MORTGAGE ACCOUNTS 0 0 0OTHER ACCOUNTS 0 0 0COLLECTIONS 0 0 0PUBLIC RECORDS 0 0 0NEGATIVE INDICATORS 0 0 0AUTHORIZED USER ACCOUNTS 0 0 0 I've had numerous installment loans over the years open and close with 100% satisfactory payments -- I've never seen my score drop below 700 before..  More importantly -- I've never seen my score GO UP 20 points (or any amount of points for that matter), through the end of an auto loan.  This was a 36 mo lease, it was bought out and paid in full 12 months early after the 24th payment.  Not sure if that makes a difference. FICO 8 handles this differently than FICO 04 did so if you were looking at some other tracking, all bets are off. Installment utilization appears to be a real thing under both the FICO 8 and '98 models, and in your case (and mine earlier) paying off loans and attaching a new one (presumably at or near original balance) you will indeed get whacked and 20 points is absolutely reasonable under a FICO 8 model for it.  Don't know if there's buffering based on having other installment loans on the report, I'll find that out in a month or two after I close on a mortgage but before it reports by paying one of my itty bitty pretty loans off. Similarly we've had reports of people getting below 80% (I went to 82% to 60% and got a small boost) but then I got a massive boost when I got my loans under 10% just yesterday: gained 29 points on EQ FICO 8 and that's with a newly scorable inquiry on my report too.  The 80 and 10% are just swags at this point rather than known breakpoints, but it's illustrative for the example.  Going through the mortgage process my files are uber locked down and as such got a clean data point, actually installment utilization is the only major change on my reports for the past year, dropped 20ish points in October when my auto loan paid (and then 5 more with my other old loan closing), and then gained them back just yesterday with the new report.