Not sure who told you that your mortgage score would be less. What they may have meant was that if you are monitoring a non-FICO score (referred to here as FAKO), you might not see the same score when your mortgage lender pulls your report. Your mortgage lender will pull FICO scores and there could be a difference between your FAKO score and your FICO score. Although I am unaware of any correlation that says your FICO will definitely be less than a FAKO. Could be higher could be lower.
That said, if you pulled your Equifax score from this site, it is a FICO score. It should be the same score you will see when your lender pulls your score. If you got your Equifax score directly from Equifax, there is a chance that it is a FICO score, but it could be a FAKO. Depends on how you got it. Equifax's Score Watch product sells a FICO score and I believe there is at least one other way to get your FICO from Equifax, but I am not certain on the details.
If you got your Equifax and Experian score through the same service, some sort of three bureau monitoring service like Truecredit, they are both FAKOs. The Experian score you have is most likely a FAKO. I believe the only place to get your Experian FICO is through a lender or be a member of PSECU, a Pennsylvania credit union. You used to be able to joins PSECU by making a donation to their parks fund, but now you have to be a Pennsylvania resident.
If you want to have a good idea of what score you will have when your mortgage lender pulls your reports, you should get your Equifax FICO, which you can get here. You can also get your TU FICO here, but it is an outdated version called TU98. Some (alot?) of lenders are now using TU04 and your score on TU04 may be different than your TU98 score. Having a Walmart credit card offers you a TU FICO score but I don't think anyone knows which version it is yet.
Maybe you can check with your mortgage lender and find out which version of TU they use. If it is TU98, you could get that here. If it is TU04, I don't know where you can get that or if it is even available. Perhaps someone else knows. So long as you can determine two of your scores, you can then have an idea of what your middle score will be. Basically, your middle score will be no lower than your lowest of the two scores you can determine no matter where the third score lies. So if you can get two scores that you know are above 620 and your lender will approve you with a middle score of 620 it won't matter about the third score.
Starting Score: ~500 (12/01/2008)
@Anonymous wrote:I got my 629 though score watch on the equifax site directly. Is that accurate?
I believe it is. I'm pretty sure the Equifax FICO score provided through ScoreWatch is the same version that is widely used by lenders, Beacon 5.0 or something like that.
@Anonymous wrote:How do I get the TU score? It only mentions Equifax and I am already paying for the score watch.
You can't get the TU score through Equifax. As mentioned above, you can buy a TU score through this site. It is available through the FICO Quarterly Monitoring service or by buying a one-time TU report (FICO Standard). Before you buy anything, run a google search for myfico discount codes. There are often codes, although there may not be anything available now.
Again, however, the TU score offered here is TU98. Alot of lenders are now using TU04. Perhaps a little more background is necessary. FICO develops scoring models for each reporting service, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. But like anything else, the scoring models are updated. So there are various different versions of FICO scores which will have subtle differences in how they process and weigh the information in a credit report, resulting in different scores based on the same report.
The only place I am aware of to get your TU FICO is at this site or by applying for a Walmart credit card (but I am certainly no authority on this, maybe others will be aware of other services that provide TU scores). But as mentioned, I don't know what version of score you're getting through Walmart. There are several other threads about this. Try running a search in the credit card forums for Walmart TU FICO. Because the scores are not the same as those offered here, people have deduced that it is not TU98. I think the speculation has it narrowed down to TU04 or TU2008.
Your TU98 score is a rough guage of your TU04 score but I've read about variance between the scores in the 20 point range. That's probably too high a variance for your specific situation. There may not be a way for you to get your TU04 score without having a lender pull it for you.