@Anonymous wrote:
@guydiver wrote:Congrats on the card. Do you know which CR they pulled yet, and if you don't mind what was your Fico? Thanks, and nice CL for starting from Walmart for sure.
Not sure what CR they pulled yet.
I am confused about my scores lately. I have no idea which is my true FICO.
EQ tells me FICO is 668 (score watch), but on ALL correspondence I have received from the credit card companies I was recently approved for, they report a 721 (or in the 720 range depending on the bureau). I think the 721 may be some "enhanced" credit card score. I do have a high income, so that probably pays a part as well.
I am not sure if 3k is good a good starting point with Walmart Discover. It is certainly enough for what the card will be used for. Discover More gave me 10k.
The 721 could be a real FICO (though the one GEMB used for your Walmart account decision was not, they do use another credit score that is not FICO). But it is possible that if you got that 721 from another CCC, it could be a true FICO. The FICO scores you get from the 3 CRA's will almost always differ due to having slightly different information in their reports. But I've noticed that with ScoreWatch, it doesn't necessarily update immediately when good things happening to your score.
For instance, I started PIF prior to statement this month on my AmEx. SW had me at 789 prior to doing this. Making this change should show a $4k drop to <1% util. Statement date was 9/10. I know the new balance got reported by 9/12 because Credit Karma showed it on that date. So I know that it was updated by AmEx promptly.
I just started receiving my first DCU Free FICO this month (which uses the same Beacon 5 scoring algorithm myFICO SW does). It came out on 9/16 and showed an 801! I was very happy, but curious as to why SW (still showing the 789) wouldn't share the good new with me as well.
Then I went back and looked at the details of the offer:
See your new FICO® score every time you get an alert of a change on your credit report. Find out when your FICO® score changes enough to impact the interest rate you would likely receive on a home mortgage, auto loan or home equity loan.
and,
- Alerts you when unexpected changes to your credit report cause your FICO® score to drop
Combining those two statements logically, they will alert you when something bad happens. And they will tell you how your score changed when they alert you. Thus you will only see a score change when there is potentially negative information. Granted, any positive information will then be factored in when they update the score you see due to potentially neg info. And if the score change bumped you into better rates (say >760) they might update you. However this is certainly not what I thought I was purchasing when I signed up.
I am not happy with the SW service. I was led to believe that the monitoring service would always show me my present score taking into account all information at the time. Needless to say, I will not be renewing the service.
My credit monitoring is about to get very cheap. 
Between the free monthly FICO's from Walmart (TU) and DCU(EQ), Credit Sesame, and Credit Karma I believe that I can monitor my credit reasonably well for $0. With Credit Karma you can update it every day and if the score drops you then know that there is something bad in your file and generally what it is. If I see a significant drop, then I'll pay to pull a complete FICO so I can run down the problem.
I just don't see spending a couple of hundred dollars a year on this. Between the ($9.95 per month = $120/yr) BoA Privacy Assist (which I'll cancel after Oct's quarterly update comes out - it's just FAKO's anyway) and the $150 for myFICO ScoreWatch I've paid $270 dollars for information I can arguably get better for free.
This was pertinent to the previous post, but I think I'll also post it as another thread in myFICO product feedback.
@Anonymous wrote:bobebob,
Thank you so much for such detailed information.
yes...my SW did show a change in my report (dropped a few points....must have been from my inquiries).
I think I am going to follow in your footsteps and drop SW after my year is up, especially after your post.
Thanks again.
Glad I could help out. 
Here's the quasi-rant I posted to the myFico Feedback (with a little more detail):
And here is a link to a detailed post from Barry (nice guy from all I've heard and read) on exactly how SW works and why the score isn't always updated:
As I say in the more detailed version I linked to, if I were actively looking for a mortgage or car loan, I would pull a full Fico from the myFico site. But for long-term monitoring I think you can do a pretty good version (and in some respects better) for $0.