Pay car note to bump scores

[Anonymous]

What are done steps where you can get a few more points by paying down your auto loan below a certain percentage. ? We owe 9k more on our car (have had it three years now) and fiancée has been trying to double the monthly payments since our rate is very high.

[Anonymous]

Would you mind listing all of your installment accounts, with the current amount and original loan amount?  Note that some other things aside from loans are classified as installment, e.g. auto leases, financing for furniture at Rooms To Go, etc.

Loan 1.  Current balance = _______   Original Amount = _______

Loan 2.  Current balance = _______   Original Amount = _______

Loan 3.  Current balance = _______   Original Amount = _______

etc.

Once we get a better sense of your entire loan situation we can advise you better.

[Anonymous]

PS.  If your goal is to increase your score a few points, there are other things you may be able to do besides pay down a loan. 

If you feel like exploring those, ler us know how many credit cards you have, and whether you could easily pay all of them to $0 except one, with the remaining card reporting a small positive balance. 

[Anonymous]

Hi there, yes that’s exactly what I’m doing the AZEO method. Just started so how many points can I expect per month? Three cards with limits of 500 on two and 1000 the third.

[Anonymous]

When you're saying points per month, are you referring to implementing AZEO on your credit cards or paying down your installment loan?  If you're referring to the CCs, AZEO is a 1-time score bump, so your scores would rise just 1 time.  Maintaining AZEO would allow you to keep that score boost in place however.

As far as your installment loan goes, CGID asked above whether or not you have any other open installment loans.  If you do have at least 1 other open loan, paying down or off your car loan will not increase your scores at all.  If the car loan is your only open installment loan, the only threshold that you'd definitely see a nice score boost would be when your balance reaches 8.9% (or less) of the original amount.  While there could be other minor score gains along the way, most report the biggest score increase when crossing that 8.9% threshold.

[Anonymous]

Aside from my ccs I have s Perkins student Loan which is 2000 balance that was in deferment but I’ve decided to start making monthly payments in hopes it will report. I have a mortgage with balance of159k that I pay on time it’s about 10 years old. It had some lates however about 6 years ago

[Anonymous]

Paying down your auto loan therefore will have ZERO impact on your FICO scores.  You can pay it down and even pay it off and due to the presence of your mortgage that you've been paying for around 10 years your scores will not change.  You did mention interest in your original post and that you've been paying double payments to save on that, which is a very smart financial decision so long as you can afford to do so.  Nice work with that.  Just be aware that you would stand to gain no points at all on your FICO scores from paying down or off that auto loan so long as your mortgage remains present/open.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymouswrote:
What are done steps where you can get a few more points by paying down your auto loan below a certain percentage. ? We owe 9k more on our car (have had it three years now) and fiancée has been trying to double the monthly payments since our rate is very high.

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If we knew what your other loans are, what the face amounts of loans were, and what the balances are, we can give you some sense of optimizing the installment part of your FICO 8 score.

It's much less clear how, or even if, other FICO scoring models react to installment utilization.