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I applied for a personal loan Tuesday and got the reply back today. The loan officer said my score is at a 600 through TU however when I look on CreditKarma it shows my scores as being much higher. I explain to the loan officer that I was looking at CK and it shows a much higher score and she said the score will be different depending on whom is seeking the score. Her example was that if a dealership pulled the score it would be different than if her bank pulled it. UH???? wth is that all about? She tried to explain in SHORT detail but it just made no sense to me. I'm a bit upset by this as it seems to me that the score might vary a bit but not by nearly 60 points! What is going on here? Is credit karma NOT a reliable source for the scores? I have been working diligently at repairing our scores and this just really put a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not sure what to do at this point. Thanks for any advice you can share.
myFICO 3B service provides numerous FICO scoring variations; full reports update quarterly. Be aware that myFICO monitoring services rely on triggers and don't automatically update for many events. Can lead to much confusion. For example, one's credit scores being reported higher after a hardpull (inquiry) due to other changes that occurred in the meantime. Or one's credit scores reporting lower after paying down credit cards. Sometimes that's legitimate (ie. paying all cards to zero), but often not.
CreditCheckTotal.com (operated by Experian) is an affordable, good source for credit report data and real FICO 8 scores, which update daily for Experian automatically (upon login) and can be requested once every 30 days for the other two bureaus.
Vantage scores provided by the likes of CreditKarma, CreditSesame, etc are of little practical use. The free services are great for monitoring report changes though.
Be wary of buying credit monitoring directly from the credit bureaus (in particular TransUnion and Equifax; Experian is pretty much FICO 8 across the board), since some don't provide real FICOs. Bizarre, but true. If there's no mention of FICO aside the score, assume it's not a FICO, and likely Vantage 3 or some other scoring variation of limited usefulness.