@Anonymous wrote:
Hi all,
I'm new to this forum and I just pulled my credit report/credit score for the first time and I guess based on the scale of the score, I want to bring it up. If anyone can give me some tips, that would be great!
- 22 years old
- 3 Credit Cards
- Citi Forward (2009)
- Chase Freedom (2010)
- AMEX Gold Preferred (2011)
- Still in college but no student loans or anything of that sort.
- I've never missed a single payment and I have always paid everything off in full.
I'm a little curious as to why my score was so low, particularly because when looking through my report, there didn't seem to be any negative marks on my report and I don't really know any method to bring it up. Some people tell me that I should let my balance run over a month or something, not really sure how I feel about that. Any insight would be awesome!
EQ: 733
TU: 790
EX: 770
Thanks!
Hello and welcome to the forums.
One thing I will ask is where did you get your scores? Unless they are lender pulled it's almost certain that none of those are FICO scores.
No one has been able to buy their own Experian FICO score since February of 2009. Creditors can pull Experian and also there is a CU (PSECU) in Pennsylvania that supplies that information to it's members only. You can only buy true FICO scores at a few places. One place is here at myFICO.
At one time you could also purchase your Transunion score at transunioncs.com but no more. Wal Mart now offers a TU08 score to those who have their store card and the Discover version.
Equifax will still sell you a FICO score found here: www.equifax.com/web-myfico-products/
Most sites these days sell what we call FAKO (or non-FICO) scores and they cannot be relied on for accuracy.
(With all due credit to long time member llecs for this):
"Virtually everyone sells scores, but they are not all FICO scores. If you got scores from the big 3, then very likely 2 or all 3 of them are not FICO scores. Experian and TransUnion do not sell FICO scores on their website. We call these non-FICO scores, FAKOs, and can easily be as much as a few points to 100+ points off your real FICO when pulled the same day. If it didn't say "FICO" next to the score, then it isn't.
Other companies (e.g. freecreditreport.com, freescore.com, truecredit, creditkarma, Equifax Credit Complete, Quizzle, and dozens of others out there) sell scores, but they are nothing more than gimmicks and lenders don't use them. They do this because they want to avoid paying any fees to FICO and when they say "credit score" people buy it anyway on the assumption that it is a FICO. The scores are off because the formula is different, factors in different things as compared to FICO, and score ranges are different than FICO's (e.g. FICO is 300-850, Vantage is 501-990, PLUS is 330-830, TransRisk is 350-850, and so on)."
