In Detroit a $6.5M loan fund threw FICO scores out, the results promising
A credit forum has back-engineered chunks of the scoring algorithm via experiments run by members.<p>Your fico score is sensitive to net credit usage (quite reasonable), but also very sensitive to the usage on <i>any individual card</i>.  eg Say you have a fico score around 800, $100k in total credit, and are using $1-2k for transactional spending that month.  However, you still have an old credit card with a limit of $300, on which you charge $151.  Maybe it&#x27;s a gas card.  Now you have an individual card reporting more than 50% utilization (but still a trivial amount of usage compared to your income and net credit.)  Your score will take a 60 plus point hit.<p>You will also take a hit if you don&#x27;t have an installment loan.  Hence people find banks that allow you to prepay loans, take out $2k loans, then prepay them down to the minimum balance the bank will allow; say $1&#x2F;month for the next 59 months.  This can also bump your score 20-40 points.<p>Things like this, and their long fight against disclosing fico scores (and in particular, <i>all</i> your fico scores -- you have at least three relevant fico scores per credit reporting agency: the old 04-ish versions used for mortgages; fico08, commonly used for credit cards; and car ficos) can have enormous impacts on eg the cost of a mortgage.  Fico is an ugly combination of stupid and&#x2F;or evil.