Auto loan balance and how it impacts FICO

[Anonymous]

So on my most recent myFICO report a negative indicator was "balance in proportion to principal...." as being too high.  If I made a payment and reduced the outstanding owed by 50% would I get a score increase?

[Creditwiser]

I believe this would be the case however other factors always come in to play and each persons report obviously has various factors.  It has been the norm for me however. 

[CreditDunce]

Here is a thread about the effects of installment utilization on your FICO scores.  They are using shared secured loans for the testing, but it "should" apply the same to autoloans:

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Installment-tradeline-utilization-thread/...

[Revelate]

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@CreditDunce wrote:

Here is a thread about the effects of installment utilization on your FICO scores.  They are using shared secured loans for the testing, but it "should" apply the same to autoloans:

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/Installment-tradeline-utilization-thread/...

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If reading through that thread, did mention near the end that I got nearly precisely the same drops from paying off my auto loans, as I got from prettying up my share secured loans so at this point I'm thinking there's a 1:1 correlation.

@OP: Depends what your current balance is, I had that message at 60% still, I don't with 9%; however, we think there's breakpoints and there's been one user supplied report that suggested 80% was one, and based on my own backwards analysis I think 20% may be another but I didn't really have time to test it concretely with a mortgage in the wind.

If the mortgage doesn't screw up this calculation when it reports (big honking installment line will obliterate my utilization metrics if it counts against it) I'll test it more explicitly if one of the other folks doesn't beat me to it.