Multiple Credit Card Credit Line increase requests

[tketch]

---

 :

Re: 

CreditGuyInDixie  :The wonderful thing about your situation is that you may be in a situation to help us answer this question.  The reason is that you have two mortgage loans and no other installment loans of any kind on your reports, closed or open.  Am I right about this?  (No auto loans, student loans, personal loans, etc.)

                                         You are correct: Just mortgages and Credit cards, no open installments

                    .......                                          

RE: If it is something you are interested in doing, please let me know!  I will help you prepare your profile so that it is in great shape for testing.  

                                      OK, I'm interested.  Let me read through the materials and I'll get back with you later.

---

[tketch]

---

 wrote:

TKetch said: I plan to test SouthJamaica’s  theory of soft0 pull v hard pull  CCs ......

SJ Replies:  It's not a theory, it's a fact. Capital One and Discover "luv button" CLI requests are soft pull. 

---

My apologies SouthJamaica. I didn't mean to dimish your advice..  Lots of things are well accepted and remain theoretical, gravity for instance.  So please take it as a compliment that I hold you in league with Isaac Newton. 

[SouthJamaica]

---

@tketch wrote:

---

 wrote:

TKetch said: I plan to test SouthJamaica’s  theory of soft0 pull v hard pull  CCs ......

SJ Replies:  It's not a theory, it's a fact. Capital One and Discover "luv button" CLI requests are soft pull. 

---

My apologies SouthJamaica. I didn't mean to dimish your advice..  Lots of things are well accepted and remain theoretical, gravity for instance.  So please take it as a compliment that I hold you in league with Isaac Newton. 

---

1. No apology was necessary

2. If you hold me in league with Isaac Newton your judgment is impaired, what are you drinking? I'll have some of what you're having

[tketch]

---

@SouthJamaica wrote:

---

2. If you hold me in league with Isaac Newton your judgment is impaired, what are you drinking? I'll have some of what you're having

---

---

[tketch]

---

---

@SouthJamaica wrote:

---

2. If you hold me in league with Isaac Newton your judgment is impaired, what are you drinking? I'll have some of what you're having

---

---

You caught me!  Tequila of course.  This is New Mexico, 100% puro de agave, Herradua or better, straight up or in a margarita.  I doesn't impare my judgement, just adds to my perspective.  Buenas Dias

---

[Thomas_Thumb]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

First thing to get out of the way is the one sense that mortgages are indeed installment loans.  This is just the "semantic" sense, e.g. what does the phrase "installment loan" mean.  A lender makes an installment loans to you when he gives you a chunk of money, and then you agree to pay it off in a series of evenly divided installments.  Thus, if you were to take out an auto loan for $36,000 to be repaid over 3 years, each payment would be a bit more than $1000 (since there would be some interest involved).  Mortgages are like car loans in that sense.  So purely in that semantic sense, mortgages are certainly installment loans.

The question that you and SJ and many others are raising is whether FICO scores mortgages in some way differently than auto loans, student loans, personal loans.  The reason to think that they might is that there are loads of FICO "reason codes", the verbiage of which specifically distinguishes between mortgage and non-mortgage installment loans.

There are also reasons to believe that, despite the existence of these codes, FICO does not in anyway distinguish between mortgage and non-mortgage I-loans.  I won't explain these reasons here, but they are real.

[The wonderful thing about your situation is that you may be in a situation to help us answer this question.  The reason is that you have two mortgage loans and no other installment loans of any kind on your reports, closed or open.  Am I right about this?  (No auto loans, student loans, personal loans, etc.)

If so, then a person like you could indeed follow the Share Secure Loan technique and report back the results to us.  If you saw a big increase, then this would be a strong piece of evidence that FICO is scoring mortgage vs. non-mortgage loans differently.  If you saw no increase at all, then this would be a strong piece of evidence the other way.] - I could not make that conclusion as the loans could very easily be treated differently relative to B/L threshold even though score does not increase (see below).

If it is something you are interested in doing, please let me know!  I will help you prepare your profile so that it is in great shape for testing.  (In order to provide meaningful test results, a person needs to get his profile and scores stable, both before and after the test, so that the one new event we are trying to test can be isolated.)  Read through the guidance on the Technique and let me know. 

---

Revelate reported on the reverse situation. As I recall, he had a pretty share secured loan he was getting score benefits from. However, when he got his mortgage, it overwhelmed the Aggregate B/L can his score to the expected hit. Therefore, if one has an open mortgage or two, adding a trivial SSL would be underwhelming and offer no benefit (increase in score) even when substantially paid down - given the open mortgage.

My contention is that aggregate B/L is based on some type of heirarchy where the B/L threshold(s) are driven by the open loan highest in the heirarchy - which would be a mortgage in this case. Perhaps only mortgages have a higher heirarchy in the installment loan space but, perhaps not. Another open question is age of the open loan as a consideration in scoring. Loans with payment history under one year likely only benefit relative to score from a reduction in B/L. However, it is unclear whether some points can be gained from longer payment history.

As mentioned in other threads, Fico 08 scores of 850 certainly have been achieved with aggregate B/L in the 60% to 70% range when an open mortgage is part of the mix. Also, only one type of installment loan is needed to satisfy this factor - just not sure on B/L requirement relative to loan type and age.

[Anonymous]

Hello TT!  You write:

"Revelate reported on the reverse situation. As I recall, he had a pretty share secured loan he was getting score benefits from. However, when he got his mortgage, it overwhelmed the Aggregate B/L can his score to the expected hit. Therefore, if one has an open mortgage or two, adding a trivial SSL would be underwhelming and offer no benefit (increase in score) even when substantially paid down - given the open mortgage."

Yep.  That's what I had in mind when I wrote:

"There are also reasons to believe that, despite the existence of these codes, FICO does not in anyway distinguish between mortgage and non-mortgage I-loans.  I won't explain these reasons here, but they are real."

I was thinking specifically about Revelate's experience.

One thing to observe is that R's situation doesn't give any insight into whether there might be a benefit purely from Credit Mix to having both non-mortgage and mortgage loans on one's report.  His before and after cases both involve having a non-mortgage loan on his report.  Our OP, by way of contrast, would be going from having no non-mortgage loans on his report to having one such loan.  If FICO 8 gives you a credit mix bonus for having both types of loans, then our OP's case would reveal that. 

That's Credit Mix -- there is also of course the installment utilization factor (aka B/L ratio).  Here the OP's case would be instructive too, if only because it would enable him (from the other direction) to replicate R's experience; or because he would fail to replicate it.  Replicating experiments (by different resarchers) is always a good thing.  Furthermore it would give us the ability to see it play out on a clean rather than dirty profile.  If any of this is scorecard dependent that would also be helpful to discover.

Finally, and here I think you and are in agreement, if the OP did experience a big score increase, that would be very significant.  You are additionally saying that the score failing to move would not in itself falsify the conjecture that FICO may treat M and NM debt differently, and I think you may be right.

One thing to bear in mind is that I have a very practical and narrow concern, which is to get multiple confirmations (from different people) that the SS Loan technique is useless for a person with no non-mortgage loans but who does have an open mortgage.  That comes up fairly often and I would love to see that repeatedly confirmed.