General Credit Topics

[alysmom24]

Hello all!

I suscribe to equifax credit monitoring and check my score at times daily ( we were wanting to apply for  a mortgage in the next couple of months).  My equifax credit score yesterday was 621 and today it is 538.  A new personal loan that I got around Thanksgiving (for Christmas shopping, not the best decision I know) went on my credit report today.  Is that normal for it to have dropped my score by 83 points.  Ahh, I am panicking a little bit about this.  How long will it take to recover from this?  There are no late payments or anything in over 2 years which is why my credit score was recovering.  

Melissa

[pizzadude]

Welcome to the forums !

Is your Equifax monitoring your EQ FICO score ?   Or your Equifax credit score ? 

Also is the personal loan reporting as an installment loan or a revolving tradeline ?   Are you certain that no other negative information has appeared on your reports ?

[alysmom24]

Thanks for the reply!

Well I always thought it was accurate because I was subscribing through equifax.com.... but maybe that is not the case?  I went to my account, and it does say Equifax Credit Score..... This would be it is not my fico score correct?  Oh well.... so is the best website to go through to monitor your credit score myfico.com?

The personal loan is listed under installments not revolving..... and I am absolutely sure that not other negative information was reported recently.  Thanks

[pizzadude]

You have to be careful ~ the Equifax credit score is not used by lenders, and can't be correlated to a FICO score.  

Have you pulled a FICO score recently ?  You can purchase an EQ FICO score either from Equifax.com or from MyFICO.

[llecs]

Ditto to the above...it isn't a FICO and lenders don't use it. Tey do offer a FICO on their site but they bury it a little bit.

With everything being equal (assuming nothing else happened), 83 points is too high of a drop for a new account. Assuming you a relatively free of new accounts and inquiries on EQ for the past year, I bet the drop wouldn't be more than 20-25. YMMV on your credit of course. It could easily be less or no drop at all. Depends on what's going on within your credit.