topic Revisiting the "$50k" CC single CL util thing in Understanding FICO® Scoring

Revisiting the "$50k" CC single CL util thing

pizza1 — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 20:43:04 GMT

This has been discussed before, but not in awhile. In the past, if you had a single CC with a $50k cl, that card was not counted in the overall available credit. Is this still the case?

I know there are folks with single CC with $50k CL's and over. Can you confirm that the particular card is taken out of the "overall available credit", and if so, which CRA?

Also, if there's a balance on said card, is the balance counted into your overall utilization, but not available credit? Or is the card just completely taken out of the equation?

Re: Revisiting the "$50k" CC single CL util thing

iv — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 21:34:22 GMT

@pizza1 wrote:
This has been discussed before, but not in awhile. In the past, if you had a single CC with a $50k cl, that card was not counted in the overall available credit. Is this still the case?

I believe that we are reasonably confident at this point that for FICO 8, the limit (if any) is higher than $50k.

@pizza1 wrote:

I know there are folks with single CC with $50k CL's and over. Can you confirm that the particular card is taken out of the "overall available credit", and if so, which CRA?

It's not so much "which CRA" as which scoring model.

Some older models (some or all "mortgage" scores) used a $35k limit. Others may have increased that to $50k, or higher.

Remember that the purpose was to avoid mixing HELOC and similar loans in with credit cards, as things like HELOCs reported (and still report) in a fairly odd way on reports. Better identification of those types of loans on reports may make a fixed dollar cutoff unneeded.

At least on FICO 8, it's been shown that cards slightly over $50k do still count. If there is a new threshold, we don't know where it is yet.

@pizza1 wrote:

Also, if there's a balance on said card, is the balance counted into your overall utilization, but not available credit? Or is the card just completely taken out of the equation?

Taken completely out of the revolving utilization equation. But it still counts for things like AAoA and number of accounts with balances.

Re: Revisiting the "$50k" CC single CL util thing

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 01:31:14 GMT

We had a couple test cases that implied 51k was safe in FICO 8 and one test case which showed 70k was not. So the breakpoint appears to be between 51k and 70, though more well designed tests would be helpful.

We have no test data for FICO 9 that I know of.