That sounds like a smart "best of both worlds" move. In retrospect, that's what I should have done with my auto loan through Wells Fargo that I paid off last month. My next payment due date was already April 2019, over a year away and had I paid down the $3500 balance or whatever it was to say $250 (one payment left) it would have pushed it out to the summer of 2020. At the time though, I didn't anticipate my scores dropping due to the closure of the loan, as I have an open mortgage present. After seeing my scores drop a little bit though and understanding that mortages are viewed differently than other installment loan types, if I could rewind the clock a month I definitely would have done a significant pay down, but not pay off.
