Line of Credit

[RobertEG]

The only definitive statement of which I am aware was made in a webinar conducted by Fair Isaac about 5 years ago.

They used to hold regular webinars to answer questions such as this, but they have been discontinued.

Since then, I have seen nothing posted direclty by FICO on this issue.

[Anonymous]

My LOC through BECU reports as revolving and is included in my total available credit, on all three CRA's and Fico 8's. It is not included in revolving in the Vantage 3.0 scores for the three.

[Revelate]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

My LOC through BECU reports as revolving and is included in my total available credit, on all three CRA's and Fico 8's. It is not included in revolving in the Vantage 3.0 scores for the three.

---

That's just presentation idiosyncracies, not FICO, nor Vantage.

You have to play with revolving utilization metrics to see if your LOC is being counted or not (analogous to AU's under FICO 8), but certainly below call it 35K it will be... line may have been moved to 50K as that's the line for other revolving accounts to be discounted from some data here.

I don't think it reports differently north of 35K (or 50K, as that would involve a change on the reporter side which is more than a little absurd technically), I think it's simply discounted probably identically to large CL credit cards.  Discounting line could be different since they are reported differently from CC's to the bureaus.

[RonM21]

So, if I'm reading correctly, a LOC is revolving like credit, but above $35K it can be an installment loan.....

[Revelate]

---

@RM21 wrote:
So, if I'm reading correctly, a LOC is revolving like credit, but above $35K it can be an installment loan.....

---

It may be counted as such, or it may just be discounted.  Without someone being able to really test it and it would be difficult to do so, the only salient fact is above some size FICO doesn't penalize a LOC for heavy revolving utilization.  

To illustrate, you'd have to have someone (using FICO 8 as an example) know their breakpoints for number of revolvers with balances, and play with the LOC, and more saliently, understand the installment utilization metric *and* be in a spot where the HELOC balance can materially affect it... which would require pretty utilization on a share secured loan or similar and that's it for open installment lines.

It'd be hard, and I'm not sure worth chasing other than just completeness' sake.

ETA: probably worse than that, you'd need a non-trivial revolving buffer to be able to isolate an installment utilization change from an aggregate revolving utilization one.  Yeah, it's just unlikely unless we happen to fall into the datapont... who wants to borrow 35K they don't need anyway for the sake of credit "science" =/.

[egaithe]

My loc is reporting as revolving credit card and I'm over the limit. Sucks.