General Credit Topics

[Longdistancerunner]

Greetings,

Happy holidays to all of you.

This question might have been brought up before. If so, I apologize in advance for a possible double post.

Could you give me some insight on which scores are more accurate?

I made a report check today on myself to see where I stand through several sources and I came up with these numbers:

FreeCreditReport.com:

Exp: 746 TU: 750 Equifax: 743

CreditKarma:

TU: 720  grade: B

Vantage score (no idea what this is): 880

Myfico.com:

Equifax: 791

TU: havent checked

So, these numbers are pretty much all over the place. Which one(s) do I take base for a realistic score?

Any and all help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[pizzadude]

Welcome to the forums ! Your FICO® score is the one that matters. Others are referred to as FAKO scores, because they are not used by lenders, and generally have scoring rules that are different than FICO®.

[Longdistancerunner]

Thank you for the info pizzadude. I was thinking about cancelling my subscription at free cedi treport.com. Since, i get the same service here and I can monitor the score that matters more here, I think I will go ahead and do that.

[Shogun]

+1  Nobody uses the scores you obtain from freecreditreport.com.

[GregB]

Scorewatch or a EQ FICO from here will give you the only really useful score available to the general public. However, as a monitoring service, Scorewatch is poor. It really depends on what you want.

If your EQ FICO is 791 and the information on your other reports is similar to EQ, then you don't really need to worry about your score. Anything above a EQ FICO 760 is irrelevant. You will be better served by a service that lets you monitor the INFORMATION on all three reports.

[HiLine]

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GregB wrote:

Scorewatch or a EQ FICO from here will give you the only really useful score available to the general public. However, as a monitoring service, Scorewatch is poor. 

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Scorewatch has a lot of alert triggers, more than any other monitoring service I have experience. So far their alerts have had a high on-time percentage for me. 

[Longdistancerunner]

Thank you all for the insight.

[rebroker212]

WhyWhy would consider score watch poor as a monitoring  service? They report on every change to your report

[Walt_K]

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rebroker212 wrote:

WhyWhy would consider score watch poor as a monitoring  service? They report on every change to your report

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It's limited to EQ, and you don't actually get to see your report.  You're just alerted of a change if it meets one of the triggering criteria.  You won't see every change, though you would see most major changes.

Scorewatch is good if you're interested in keeping track of your EQ score, but if you're not so interested in the score but want to know what is on your reports, there are better priced options that will allow you to actually see the information on all three reports.  My favorite is eliminateidtheft.com.  For $180/year my wife and I get to pull each report daily.  So $7.50/month/person.  A lot of people like USAA's credit monitoring service as well. 

[GregB]

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rebroker212 wrote:

WhyWhy would consider score watch poor as a monitoring  service? They report on every change to your report

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No, they don't. They only report on the changes that meet their triggers. Balance decreases are not reported, which is about 15-20 of the 20-25 changes that I have each month. Mortgage, HELOC, car is always down and I have more CCs that report less than more each month.  

For about the same money, there are products that let you monitor the information on all three CRAs. Just ignore the scores. For less money, there are several products that only monitor EX and EX is so much faster to update that there is no comparison. EX updates in hours, whereas EQ and TU take at least a day longer and usually 2-4.

What Scorewatch gives you is some monitoring along with the only really useful credit score that is available to anyone. Scorewatch combined with EX monitoring and TU free updates via CreditKarma worked fine for me.