August 7, 2015 | By Greg Fisher

I'm with the media, I'm writing about your terrestrial broadcast station and I'm on deadline. It is tomorrow.

Everything's big in Texas—even screw-ups.

Yesterday, you wrote, "A large part of your credit score depends the[SIC] ratio between your credit line and how much you own."

Aye, yi, yi—where do we begin?

Myth 16

First of all, where are you getting this business about a large part? As far as I know, it could be 1%.

I got it straight from the horse's mouth (and I know that you know everything about horses out there #n528). When I asked Fair Isaac about this notion in 2009,^[*] they said

When my company explains FICO scoring to a general audience, we apply general weights to major data categories such as, 'Amounts Owed is 30 percent of a typical consumer's score.' We don't break that weighting into finer parts for individual factors, both to avoid unintentionally misleading the public and to protect the model's proprietary information.

If you know something else, then let's see it, Cowboy. #Myth16

Having said that, at the risk of creating even more confusion, I'm going to show you something that will blow your mind. Even Fair Isaac (the FICO score company) said, impossibly (and on multiple occasions), "Debt-to-limit ratio makes up 30% of your FICO Score."

Of course, that is mathematically impossible. If a category of 6 items is 30 percent of the whole, then how could just one item in the category be 30 percent? The only way that could be true is if the other five items in the category are all zero. Hokey smokes! Now what do we do? #FICOFriday

Second, there are 19 words in your sentence. There probably should be 20 ('on' after 'depends'). #SyndicatedError

Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)

Finally, assets are not a factor in credit scoring, so "how much you own" has nothing to do with credit scores. That's not just how the consumer reporting agencies want it; it is dictated by our law. I'm pretty sure that you understand your error, and that it's just that your execution sucks and spell-checkers won't find wrong words speled right. #SloppySloppySloppy

At least, I hope that's the case. If not, the world is in serious trouble.

Anyway

–and welcome to #CreditLand, home of the #FingerFlappingTSP. Things here work like this: Somebody says something stupid so I call them out. They don't acknowledge their error, but they never do it again (all you can hope for in cat-herding).

But you could be an exception. Will you help me? You have a stick throwing off a megawatt, and I don't. What is your correction policy?

--
Greg Fisher
Truth and Falsity
truthandfalsity.com
Page A2
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The Credit Scoring Site
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PO Box 342
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skype fisher100
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PS. John Boehner is not Majority Leader. You both blew it, but I want to see if you can get history right before your competitor does. Make a correction today.