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I found that my auto loan trade lines for me and my DW were showing a high balance below the current balance and I believe this was negatively impacting our FICO scores due to high utilization on an installment loan. As a rule of thumb, you want your installment loans to be below 90% utilization for better FICO scores where utilization is the current balance divided by the original loan amount. With PenFed, we added on extended warrantee protection and the loans were reporting a high balance of the original car's principal balance, but the current balance was higher than this due to the addition to the loan principal of the cost of the extended warrantee. This was giving us a term loan utilization higher than 100% which is detrimental to your FICO score. Therefore, I contacted PenFed by phone to correct the issue by phone and got no where, so I sent a dispute in writing documenting that the loan document I signed showed an amount borrowed that did not match what they were reporting as the high balance. They responded in writing that they were reporting correctly. I called up and said I wanted to escalate and was told they would have to refer the matter to their legal department for further review. Now a few months later they have changed their position and agreed there is an error writing to me: I also spoke with them by phone and they indicated that the issue affect all auto loans at PenFed, so I'm writing here to alert every one in case they added any products like GAP protection or extended warrantee that increased their loan amount beyond the car purchase price so that they can make sure the correction applies to them as well.