50% may be utilization threshold for individual card

[Anonymous]

^^^Agreed.

[Anonymous]

IMHO, I agree that  equal to or less than 9% is optimal for the majority of the people for scoring purposes ... maybe not for debt purposes, but for scoring purposes. For the majority of people, there’s no significant difference within that interval.

True enough with large limits come penalties for raw dollar amounts, which make it hard to discern thresholds.

[Anonymous]

I  agree with  @SouthJamaica that calling the  1-9% range "Optimal" is somewhat misleading.  So I  suggest to  call the  1-9% range  some like "great" and don't mention AZEO  at  that place.  Then  right below,   add a new box with "Optimal"  on  the left and  "One card with small balance ... AZEO ... " on the right.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I  agree with  @SouthJamaica that calling the  1-9% range "Optimal" is somewhat misleading.  So I  suggest to  call the  1-9% range  some like "great" and don't mention AZEO  at  that place.  Then  right below,   add a new box with "Optimal"  on  the left and  "One card with small balance ... AZEO ... " on the right.

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It is optimal, as I have shown in the earlier post. Especially for people just starting out in the credit world who will have credit limits under the $31,015 average total shown by Experian.

It isn't optimal if someone has much higher credit limits than the majority of the public, also shown in my post.

I will make a note of it though, that high balances + high total credit limits will change the penalty. Some of the 1% step changes on people's credit files here are around $5000 each!

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous: Your arguments seem to based on the assumption that the score changes  @SouthJamaica is observing are based on  raw dollar amounts and not on percentages.  But I have not seen any evidence for that and  I really doubt it. Changes due to raw dollar amounts should be  fairly easy to  detect.  I'm sure SouthJamaica's total credit limits has changed over the last two years, so if the changes are due to raw dollars and not percentages they would know.

My profile does seem somewhat similar to SouthJamaica's, but  I  never observed any  Ex Fico 8 scores changes due to  raw dollars or due to  Agg Util (other than at 9%). 

So I really wish SouthJamaica would provide way more details for the score changes caused by Agg Util they are observing:  Scorecard, Total Balance (before and after), Total  Credit Limit, any AU accounts involved, any closed accounts with balance, what else changed on that day, ....

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@Anonymous wrote: Some of the 1% step changes on people's credit files here are around $5000 each!

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Mine are

[Anonymous]

That’s a good point. I guess I would expect to see point change for every percent where every percent represents $5000, especially when you are in the optimal interval, which is going to most likely have the highest number of thresholds for raw dollar amount.

When we go to the simulator what’s the low end of the highest selection? Like 20 or 25k? One could infer the majority of the raw dollar amount penalties are therefore under that amount.

And if you’re in the optimal interval that means you’re going to be say under 90,000 or under 40,000 so you’re going to hit all those thresholds. High total credit limit profiles are just not great for utilization testing in the optimal bracket, in my humble opinion.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I will make a note of it though, that high balances + high total credit limits will change the penalty. Some of the 1% step changes on people's credit files here are around $5000 each!

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Ok, but people will ignore the note and just see your beautiful graphic.  Let me change my suggestion:

Call the  1-9% range  "Optimal for most"  and don't mention AZEO  at  that place.  Then  right below,   add a new box with "Optimal for all"  on  the left and  "One card with small balance ... AZEO ... " on the right.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

@Anonymous: Your arguments seem to based on the assumption that the score changes  @SouthJamaica is observing are based on  raw dollar amounts and not on percentages.  But I have not seen any evidence for that and  I really doubt it.

@Anonymous  Now you have, and you can formulate a new opinion based on it:

(These are 2 of a long list of possible reason statements that can be shown for FICO 8 scores. They are from a PDF document produced by FICO and the entire table has been in the General Scoring Primer thread for a while now.)

Amount owed on accounts is too high	1	1	1	Balance track
Amount owed on revolving accounts is too high	11	11	11	Balance track

FICO is tracking raw dollar amounts at some point in that algorithm. This makes complete sense because TCL alone doesn't necessarily say anything about a person's ability to pay.

2% may mean $10,000. It makes me think of all the articles about people making $150K that are living paycheck to paycheck. $10K is $10K and there could easily be many in a scorecard that defaulted shortly after a $10K reported total balance.

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@Anonymous wrote: Some of the 1% step changes on people's credit files here are around $5000 each!

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Mine are

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Mine aren't and my F8 scores are rock solid month to month in the (0-9]% + ($0, $1688] range with [$8500, $32000] total credit limit range.

I have 13 months+ of myFICO 3B report data, with full reason statements on all 28 scores, to show that:  https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/The-All-at-less-than-9-Utilization-experiment/m-p/5448185/highlight/true#M148614

The only thing that negatively changes my F8 scores are number of accounts reporting a balance, inquiries, and new accounts.

People with high credit limits may experience penalties that appear to be related to utilization thresholds, but they are actually related to raw dollar amount. It's the only way to explain it since I do not see any of those changes on my already sensitive new-to-credit file with the previously mentioned credit limit and balance data.

[Anonymous]

And it doesn’t get much more sensitive than a thin young new account profile.

[Anonymous]

I'd like to see some more testing on the raw dollar amounts verses percentages theory.  I do think that if raw dollars do matter, which I believe could very well be the case based on the language of the reason statements, quite often people assume that it's due to percentages.  Unfortunately, it's not the easiest thing to test.  Say someone has TCL of $150k.  If we want to test the $10k point of aggregate utilization, that would be 6.66%.  You'd essentially need to report something in the range of $9000-$9975 one month, then somewhere between $10k and $10,350 the following month so that aggregate utilization percentage stays in the same range.... 6.something rounded to 7% for Fico purposes.  Go above that and you cross 7% and you have two variables at play, not just the raw dollar testing point of $10k in this example.