Mortgage scoring questions

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

@RevelateWait A minute. I thought it ignored the utilization but counted towards AZ? I thought this was firmly nailed down.

Duke yes you have my understanding correctly. With that said, you could always remove her off of your Discover and off-cycle update, making her AZEO.

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I saw with my HELOC that it didn't count for AZ but I still had "high revolving usage" on the report.  Specifically that reason code was on there with "no revolving activity" too at the same time.

I will have to double check that again on the CSR but I think when it reported and I got the reason code again aggregate with the CFU, and then when I paid it off it went away.

[Anonymous]

Op, it sounds like you're on the right track. Wishing you and your wife all the best in going through the mortgage process! I just wanted to mention that if you do get the MyFICO premier membership, I believe it gives a 20% discount on pulling either a single or 3B report if you want to pull your report/s in between waiting for the monthly membership reports they dole out. I wouldn't normally recommend spending extra and only you know your finances, but in all honesty, I pulled my reports a couple of extra times in the months leading up to my mortgage last year even with having the membership. I just wanted to try to optimize everything and because I was so stressed about it, I found it helpful at the time. For me, it was worth it in that particular situation, but of course, everyone if different. Just something to keep in mind. In any case, keep us posted on your progress and your scores! Good luck 🍀

[Anonymous]

@Revelate So it appears the HELOC does not count for AZ (the number of revolvers with a balance metric), (which TT advised me is not a utilization metric).

It makes sense that it would be counted somewhere, such as in high revolving balances, otherwise there would be a big hole. Kind of makes sense because it’s a revolver but it’s not a card.

The exclusions were for the HELOCs, so it may make sense they are not counted in the AZ metric, but are counted in a secondary revolving metric, not straight utilization, for loss of a better term. But at the same time a card would count on the AZ metric but not towards utilization. And the card may even count on the secondary revolving metric.

Thoughts? I’m just brainstorming here.

[Revelate]

I believe EX FICO 2 doesn't have a HELOC exclusion.  Not even sure the FICO 04 variants do, EX FICO 3 does not but that wasn't ever a useful score, it might've gotten updated for EQ FICO 5 / TU FICO 4.  Maybe.

FICO 8 didn't care, at all about the HELOC being maxxed out in my case.  

I've always considered number of revolvers with balances to be one of 3 different revolving utilization calculations but splitting hairs here TBH.

[Anonymous]

@Duke_Nukem Here is the deal. Her file is dirty also, right?

If you’ve got the one car loan in her name and it’s 70% paid off, if you can pay it down to just over 91% so that you have less than 9% remaining, that would probably give her a boost because that is her only installment loan.

The only problem is dirty files have a maximum and I don’t know what they are. Rev could give better insight on that.

I believe if you took her off of that discover she would be at AZEO with 0% utilization but without being penalized for no revolving balance penalty, because it’s not a utilization metric and she will have a revolver with a balance counting.

Now I can’t say all this 100% for sure. I am doing some theorizing here.

[Anonymous]

Rev, I thought the whole purpose for the exclusion was to ignore HELOCS. Am I incorrect? What was the purpose of the exclusions?

(and you answered before I wrote my response to Duke, so I saw it afterwards.)

what is the third revolving utilization metric?

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Rev, I thought the whole purpose for the exclusion was to ignore HELOCS. Am I incorrect? What was the purpose of the exclusions?

(and you answered before I wrote my response to Duke, so I saw it afterwards.)

what is the third revolving utilization metric?

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The exclusion came in though around FICO 8 timeframes and it's been unclear if that got back-ported to earlier models.

Aggregate utilization, individual tradeline utilization, number of revolvers with balances are the 3 revolving utilization metrics as I've always labelled it.

You can actually get pretty high in some of the dirty scorecards: tax lien / collection / 60D in 2015 (which would've been about 3 years AAOA at the time) I got north of 720 on a decently optimized file as I still had some inquiries outstanding; more recently with a 60D late on a highly-optimized TU file my TU FICO 4 came back north of 770 but on the PR scorecards (BK / collection / judgement / tax liens if they ever come back) the max seems around 750ish.

[Anonymous]

Rev, I thought the exclusions were from the originals and meant to exclude HELOCs. Thought that's why it incrementally went up.

So what were their actual purpose? And if they came in around version 8, whats the cutoff for 8?

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Rev, I thought the exclusions were from the originals and meant to exclude HELOCs. Thought that's why it incrementally went up.

So what were their actual purpose? And if they came in around version 8, whats the cutoff for 8?

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I am not positive there is a cut off based on limit or at least not only, I think they are looking at tradeline type too.  Specifically I maxed out my HELOC at the end of 2018, FICO 8 was sitting fat dumb and pretty and EX FICO 2 was complaining about high revolving usage even when all other revolvers were zero (incidentally I got the no revolving activity at that time too).  I didn't really test FICO 04 variants other than EX FICO 3 IIRC had the same reason code. I only get 2 reason codes from DCU and if it did count it didn't make the list and there also isn't much score variation between November and February the following year but that isn't conclusive.

This is on a 27k and change HELOC which is less than the 50K FICO 8 line IIRC... there may just be multiple ways of excluding it to catch the various reporting idiosyncrasies that existed then.

It was intimated by a FICO employee on this forum at the time that they were applied to FICO 04 too but of course that was never confirmed either way and you have to go all the way back near the dawn of this forum to find it.

By FICO 8 I should have been more explicit: implemented around 2008.

[Anonymous]

It actually makes sense to me Rev. Seems like they wanted to exclude it from traditional revolving utilization, but they didn’t wanna leave the door totally open, so they left the reason code for high revolving useage to account for those special revolvers.

The all zero code would track because all your other non-special revolvers were at zero.

Is this a possibility or is there something that kills it?