@Revelate wrote:If you don't have anything important (read as mortgage or auto loan) coming up in the next however long you care about, go sort it with a SSL imo.
FICO 04 doesn't care about installment utilization/ratios but EX FICO 2 has moved for me every time I made a material change in my installment loans.
FICO 04 was a pretty significant departure from the earlier models, and FICO does take their datasets and play to see what is a predictor of default and what is not... presumably the data they had after the dotcom bubble and collapse suggested that installment utilization wasn't really a factor and so they discounted it. Oddly enough it does appear to be in the FICO 04 industry options of some sort.
FICO changed it again in FICO 8, every model is a different target unfortunately but in general optimizing for one optimizes for all.
@Revelate, when you and @Tom_Thumb talk about the mortgage scores, I never know which ones you're talking about exactly, because you both have a familiarity with the history of those scoring models that I don't have.
All I know is the present FICO terminology for the mortgage scores -- EQ FICO 5, TU FICO 4, and EX FICO 2.
I can now say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in my profile
(a) EQ FICO 5 and EX FICO 2 are indifferent to my open installment loans, my absence of open installment loans, and my installment loan utilization percentage, and
(b) TU FICO 4 does factor these in, but much more mildly than the FICO 8 and FICO 9 scoring models (estimated 25% of the strength).
I have now measured this on the way up, when I dropped my overall utilization from high numbers down to 8.9%, and on the way down, when my last open installment account went to zero. And as far as I am concerned, it is now confirmed, both by the scores and by the negative reason codes.
