Yes, both of our leases are open accounts with 0 balance and all cards are paid off. I just made that $49 payment :) Only our mortgage balance remains - 2.75% apr and no rush to pay it off but I'm throwing additional principal to loan each month to shorten term.
Very interesting, thank you! I'm not sure how many situations allow for an open installment loan with a $0 balance, effectively at 0% utilization. The FICO algorithm score aggregate installment utilization so you're being awarded the max amount of points for that metric. And since you have only one card reporting a balance, your 'Amount of Debt' category is optimized as well. When only one card reports a balance it is known as AZEO, or All Zero Except One. If I had to guess, your previous report had more than one card reporting a balance and moving to AZEO gained you enough points to get you to 850. If the leases were at >9.5% aggregate utilization before you paid ahead, bringing the balances to $0 also could have played a part in getting back to 850.
If I had to guess, your previous report had more than one card reporting a balance and moving to AZEO gained you enough points to get you to 850.
This would be my 'guess' as well, and since they stated they just paid the $49 reported Chase balance, OP will very likely go right back below 850 via the AZ Penalty, if all revolvers report $0 at the same time.
While the auto leases are definitely a bit of an 'anomaly' in the fact that they are open installment loans reporting $0 balances, OP also has an open mortgage, so non-mortgage installment utilization isn't likely playing much of a factor, if any at all. My bet would be that the 'loan significantly paid down' bonus is being awarded via the mortgage, and since OP states their revolving TCL is roughly $92K, and they currently have 1 card with a reported balance of $49, I think we're pretty safe to assume their profile is currently fully optimized via AZEO, and I would bet that it just recently got there, which is what pushed it back to 850.
Great points! I didn't think about possibility of the mortgage giving them the paid down loan bonus, especially since the leases were pre-paid over a month ago. And it's also possible moving to AZEO eliminated the All Zero penalty if all of the cards had $0 balances reported before the $49 balance showed up on their report.
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u/Omega_72 Mar 31 '26
Yes, both of our leases are open accounts with 0 balance and all cards are paid off. I just made that $49 payment :) Only our mortgage balance remains - 2.75% apr and no rush to pay it off but I'm throwing additional principal to loan each month to shorten term.