@yellowfever13 wrote:A year ago I had two rent houses (with mortgages) and credit card debt of 10k. My total revolving limit is around 30k. All that has changed is I sold both rent houses and my revolving debt is now down to 3k. My score went from 839 to 800. Can someone explain why having 3 mortgages is better than 1 or more cc debt etc? Confused. I figured 3 mortgages would be a bad thing, and I know your revolving is supposed to be under 10% of limit.
It's FICO 8; Short form FICO 8 wants to see open installment lines, and pretty utilization numbers (ratio of current balance to original balance) on them too. 40 points from a 4928 carat gold plated score, sounds about right as even my own 730ish score drops 25-30 points if I were to pay mine off.
You can get the points back with a small secured (or unsecured) installment loan and just paying 90% of it back immediately assuming the lender in question pushes the payment date out into the future, which most will apparently. Only one glaring example that won't that we've found so far.
Longer version:
@TheConductor wrote:
@yellowfever13 wrote:Very interesting, hadn't thought about original balance ratio. Those mortgages were 10 and 12 years old... so that does start to make some sense. Man these algorithms are screwy. They sometimes seem to be counter intuitive.
Much like IQ tests, they're less screwy in the middle of their range, but once you're at the high or low edge they can be pretty wonky and sensitive to slight variations.
Yeah well I'm in the middle of the range as far as FICO goes and I was a little miffed at dropping 30ish points TBH 
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Installment utilization metrics came as a pretty nasty shock as FICO 04 ignored it completely from the anecdotal data.