I still have nothing down to here as far as installment utilization goes. Just kicked another 5K to my auto loan after it became clear my remaining income wasn't in much jeopardy and didn't need as substantial a reserve as I was thinking... it's just incredibly slow to make a meaningful dent in a mortgage balance and just not much financial justification to do so at 3.25% and it utterly dominates the calculation.
| Installment Utilization | 1-Nov | 798 | |
| Name | Current | Original | Ratio |
| Mortgage | 198954 | 258750 | 0.769 |
| Auto | 31481 | 55700 | 0.565 |
| Total | 230435 | 314450 | 0.733 |
@gorgon wrote:If an auto loan drops below the 88.9% threshold, would that increase my score? I have been making payments early and paying more than the minimum on my Cap1 auto loan, so my loan is quickly approaching 88.9% of the original balance.
My experience with score effects of paying down my only installment loan was that I picked up slight points
at certain junctures in FICO 8 scores, but didn't get a significant number of points until I was down to 9%.
I remember when dh got this "what's helping" when he went from 22% to 23% pd off on mortgage and I thought hmmmm that's not all that good. Why would they consider that good?
What's helping your score?
Low Revolving Credit Usage Substantial Installment Loan Repayment
Your balances on mortgage and/or non-mortgage installment loans are low or substantially paid off.
FICO® Scores evaluate the total outstanding installment loan balances in relation to the original loan amounts on those accounts. Having made substantial payments on mortgage and/or non-mortgage installment loans is seen as lower risk. As installment loan balances decrease, they have less impact on a FICO®Score. Note, consolidating or moving debt from one account to another will usually not help a FICO® Score since the same total amount is owed and the score may go down due to opening a new account.
@gorgon wrote:If an auto loan drops below the 88.9% threshold, would that increase my score? I have been making payments early and paying more than the minimum on my Cap1 auto loan, so my loan is quickly approaching 88.9% of the original balance.
I do believe you would get a small increase in your FICO 8 scores, assuming it's your only open loan.
AFAIK there are only two installment thresholds. The well known one at 8.9% but there is one higher than that (but much smaller maybe 1/2 the size based on my old data) somewhere around 66% it seems. This is for FICO 8 and below, don’t think anyone has good data around it for FICO 9.
88.9% or whatever is not a breakpoint on a bunch of people’s data: gone down to 70.9% aggregate personally on my new data set nothing yet.
It isn’t like revolving utilization where there are a lot of breakpoints and unfortunately the “what’s helping your score” is just fluff. CMS’s were evolving into something really good then they just stopped making improvements and what we are left with is something deliberately vague and misleading.
Anyway 8.9% is where the reason code disappears entirely for loan balances on every FICO model I had access to at the time. I still have small problems like inquiries and a CFA and recently opened accounts and as such some of the smaller weight reason codes in the algorithm are hard to tease out.
88.9% or whatever is not a breakpoint on a bunch of people’s data: gone down to 70.9% aggregate personally on my new data set nothing yet.
It isn’t like revolving utilization where there are a lot of breakpoints and unfortunately the “what’s helping your score” is just fluff. CMS’s were evolving into something really good then they just stopped making improvements and what we are left with is something deliberately vague and misleading.
Anyway 8.9% is where the reason code disappears entirely for loan balances on every FICO model I had access to at the time. I still have small problems like inquiries and a CFA and recently opened accounts and as such some of the smaller weight reason codes in the algorithm are hard to tease out.