Installment chaos

[vanillabean]

Per Amex CreditSecure, my HELOC reported a zero balance on EQ yesterday while my pre-transferred mortgage had disappeared the day before. The only account reporting a balance now is a credit card.

My score before this was 850. Yesterday morning a myFICO mortgage change alert indicated a change from 849 to 845. So would you figure 849 after the mortgage fell off and 845 after the zeroed HELOC?

Except half an hour before the alert I had pulled a myFICO score report, which correctly listed the two updates, but with a score of 849, not 845. I was reminded that I usually get myFICO alerts the day after.

So the alert score of 845 is based on the gone mortgage only, after which the zeroed HELOC brought it back up to 849. The myFICO alert picked up the before score from my report which was run after!

Maybe a myFICO HELOC change alert will pop up later today. The before and after scores are likely to be entertaining.

[vanillabean]

Today's myFICO alert showed an EQ increase from 845 to 849 with no explanation.

[Anonymous]

A bunch of 850 club posters on other credit boards have mentioned many times that mortgages oddly have the least effect on your FICO score  (as long as always paid on time).  Interesting how little their effect is on someone with a thick perfect file!

[Revelate]

If you're getting the HELOC / mortgage alerts I'm making the liberal assumption you're getting from MF transunion monitoring.

Those come with reason codes if you look under the web interface, would you pretty please do me the favor of copying the reason codes from the various alerts to go with your timeline?

I saw a little bit of oddity around my own HELOC on Experian in particular, but for Transunion it was a non-event; that said I am like 235/258 on the mortgage, and it's only a 27K HELOC; >90% if the HELOC doesn't factor at all, >80% if it does, so I'm not certain I'd be beyond a breakpoint anyhow.  I know explicitly that my HELOC is not counting as revolving under FICO 8, but I don't know yet if it factors into installment utilization.  Also don't know even if it is counted whether it does at a $0 balance or not, couple things to try if I can ever find a breakpoint.

In your case if everything installment is flat $0 now, maybe put $10 on the HELOC and see what happens?

[vanillabean]

---

@Revelate wrote:

If you're getting the HELOC / mortgage alerts I'm making the liberal assumption you're getting from MF transunion monitoring.

---

They are myFICO Score Watch credit alerts. One was for a mortgage (the account was listed) and one for a HELOC (no account was listed).

[Revelate]

---

@vanillabean wrote:

---

@Revelate wrote:

If you're getting the HELOC / mortgage alerts I'm making the liberal assumption you're getting from MF transunion monitoring.

---

They are myFICO Score Watch credit alerts. One was for a mortgage (the account was listed) and one for a HELOC (no account was listed).

---

Ah darn it; when I was fiddling with installment utilization I had reason codes around it, would've been interesting to see if they showed up here to shed some additional insight on the data points.

Guess I should walk my own HELOC + mortgage out and see when I cross 90% with just mortgage and 80% with HELOC too and see I get any points though I didn't lose the installment utilization reason code till I got under 10% (or 9% with rounding) so unfortunately will be harder to tease out.