A small aside on credit scores.
The "free" scores I get from the bureaus are VantageScore, not FICO. I recently applied for a mortgage, and the lender used FICO scores, all of which were lower and in one case by a non-trivial amount. It didn't make any difference to the loan terms, I still qualified for the lowest rate for the term I was financing.
The lesson I took away from this: I don't need to pay much attention to small movements in my credit score, despite the breathless advertising from the three bureaus and the associated credit-monitoring ecosystem. First, because the score I have access to is meaningless. Second, because those small differences are immaterial anyway.