@Credit4Growth wrote:
Again, thanks to all participants. It helped to reconfirm to me the information which is spaces around the entire forums.
Personally when I am either attempting AZEO or just trying to keep as many Fico points as possible I tend to stick with threshold of < 8.44%, 28.44% 48.44%... and so forth to conform and adhere to the knowledge dispersed within this forum. Like the rounding up @Anonymous refers to in post 165 of this thread
https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/The-Truth-about-Credit-Card-Utilization/td-p/5116660/page/17
@Credit4Growth: The thresholds are all integers. There will be no fractional part used by the FICO algorithm to compare with the thresholds set by their data analytics team. [0.01 to 0.9999999] util will be 1%, for example.
That's the nice thing about taking the ceiling of ((balance/limit) *100 ) [ceiling( ((B/L) *100), 1) in Excel] - the ceil function always returns an integer. So whatever algorithm FICO is using doesn't have to consider fractional parts and can do a fast integer compare.
That '<8.99% to avoid 9.00 being taken as 9.0000001' is a complete speculation, probably based on the widely reported floating point bug in the 90's. This will not be an issue because:
1) Major FCRA violation if someone's reported 9.00% exact util ends up being taken as ceiling(9.01)= 10%. (Mine hasn't, as expected.)
2) It's CompSci 101 to never use floats for currency calculations: https://www.google.com/search?q=don%27t+use+floats+for+money
3) There is no way a Senior Developer working on such critical code, that is executed millions of times each day, is not going to know about #2 first, then #1. Even a Junior Developer isn't going to push that sort of code.
It needlessly complicates things to use those 'x.99' values in describing thresholds/intervals, but I expect it will continue anyway. My Discover card is reporting 9.00% right now, as it has for several cycles. I'm not in any danger of it being taken as 10%.
