In the past, when my installment utilization dropped below 10% I experienced a big bang in my FICO 8's and 9's, to the tune of 30 points across the board.
It happened today that my installment utilization dropped from 18% to 8%.
The 'bang' in my EX FICO 8 was a mere 5 points.
The differences between then and now:
-number of installment loans: this was over 6 loans, in the past it was just 1 or 2
-other utilization: this was during a time of very high utilization for me, in the past it was very low utilization
Go figure.
One of my smaller loans is still at > 10%. Since it had 0% interest, I decided not to rush paying it off. I'm going to get that one down to < 10%, and see if that makes a difference.
Update: EQ FICO 8 appears to have jumped 19 points, but it's impossible to discern whether that's attributable to just this event.
@Anonymous wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:In the past, when my installment utilization dropped below 10% I experienced a big bang in my FICO 8's and 9's, to the tune of 30 points across the board.
It happened today that my installment utilization dropped from 18% to 8%.
The 'bang' in my EX FICO 8 was a mere 5 points.
The differences between then and now:
-number of installment loans: this was over 6 loans, in the past it was just 1 or 2
-other utilization: this was during a time of very high utilization for me, in the past it was very low utilization
Go figure.
One of my smaller loans is still at > 10%. Since it had 0% interest, I decided not to rush paying it off. I'm going to get that one down to < 10%, and see if that makes a difference.
Update: EQ FICO 8 appears to have jumped 19 points, but it's impossible to discern whether that's attributable to just this event.
@SouthJamaica you do mean your aggregate installment utilization dropped to 8%?
Yes
@Thomas_Thumb wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:In the past, when my installment utilization dropped below 10% I experienced a big bang in my FICO 8's and 9's, to the tune of 30 points across the board.
It happened today that my installment utilization dropped from 18% to 8%.
The 'bang' in my EX FICO 8 was a mere 5 points.
The differences between then and now:
-number of installment loans: this was over 6 loans, in the past it was just 1 or 2
-other utilization: this was during a time of very high utilization for me, in the past it was very low utilization
Go figure.
One of my smaller loans is still at > 10%. Since it had 0% interest, I decided not to rush paying it off. I'm going to get that one down to < 10%, and see if that makes a difference.
Update: EQ FICO 8 appears to have jumped 19 points, but it's impossible to discern whether that's attributable to just this event.
Was there a difference on length of open loan payment history now vs in the past? I continue to believe that open loans with longer payment history will see less of a point gain by reducing aggregate (or individual) B/L ratio than loans with under 1 year payment history.
As an illustration, a 5 year auto loan with 3 years payment history at a 50% B/L may see a 5 point gain dropping below 9% B/L whereas the same 5 year loan with only 6 months payment history might see a 20 point gain dropping from 50% to below 9%. There have been a few posters with a single open auto loan (no other open loans) reporting minimal score increases when B/L dropped below 9%. These loans had more than 2 years payment history. Can't recall thickness of poster files and amount/age of closed loans or if all those details were provided.
Good question.
The ones from my past experiments were all very young; none lasted close to a year.
The current open loans are:
-2 years 3 months
-11 months
-7 months
-7 months
-7 months
-5 months