Question About Factors With Negative Impact

[Anonymous]

My FICO8 score based on Equifax is 727, which is nothing to complain about, but I question some of the factors that are having a negative impact on my score.

In all, my FICO report lists three negative factors, one of which I acknowledge: It's a paid collection (for $92) that is by now 5 years and 4 months old. It's the other two listed factors that I question:

"The remaining balance on your mortgage or non-mortgage installment loans is too high ... Percentage of principal you have paid down on your open non-mortgage installment loans [is] 53% ... FICO High Achievers have paid down an average of 40% of the principal on their non-mortgage installment loans."

"You have few accounts that are in good standing ... Number of your accounts currently being paid as agreed [is] 7 accounts ... FICO High Achievers have an average of 6 accounts currently being paid as agreed."

(The emphasis comes from me, obviously.)

I fail to understand why these last two factors have any negative impact at all on my FICO score, since in both cases I appear to be more successful than "FICO High Achievers." If anything, these appear to be positive factors, not negative factors.

So, why are these negative factors?

[Revelate]

Because the additional interpretations including the High Acheivers bit is all just fluff.

The reason codes matter and come from the bureaus, and they're never, ever positive.

That one regarding installment line utilization, it does not go away till under like 8.9% (depending how the rounding goes); you could be decades into a mortgage and still have that there even if clearly there's a place FI's can beat money out of you if you flake.  As a result some of them don't make much rational sense but it's just patterns in the data: they break down when we're talking individuals like all of us are.

The few accounts in good standing may actually not be a reason code, look on the industry options and see if you see something similar they're usually pretty close for reason codes to the base FICO 8 from what I've seen anecdotally.  FICO 8 Classic reason codes though universally suck, it's a legit complaint about CMSs these days.

[Anonymous]

I understand the part about the interpretations in general and the 'High Achievers' being fluff. I long suspected that the interpretations were just boilerplate without real meaning. That's obvious from the numbers in my case.

I used to get the same interpretations concerning credit line utilization and too few accounts in good standing when my score was over 800 in the days before my paid collection.

This is the part I didn't quite understand: "... you could be decades into a mortgage and still have that there even if clearly there's a place FI's [Financial Institutions] can beat money out of you if you flake [miss a payment, etc.]  As a result some of them don't make much rational sense but it's just patterns in the data ..."

Could you explain?

[Anonymous]

In other words that negative reason code is there until your B/L is under 8.9%.

Because you will get a big score jumped at that point. And that’s what’s holding him back scorewise. Negative reason codes are in order of priority.

Yes version 8 codes suck. The original tradeline from that collection, is it still showing negative? If so that could be the six out of seven?