The monitoring solutions don't pick everything up unfortunately. If you really want to know, have to go to the base reports. TU and EQ behave similarly so if you have snapshots, can probably find a change.
Regarding scores, they are absolutely different than what the mortgage industry uses:
Reasons for that, cost and ease/availability are likely the dominant ones. I think USAA is a VantageScore anyway.
Comments inline.
@Anonymous wrote:Others have more expertise but here's what I've learned as we are going through the mortgage process.
Your LO should give you a copy of the credit report he pulled. They pull mortgage scores. On the credit report it will show you what they pulled. Most LO use a credit pulling firm to pull. It will say like FICO-II TU CLASSIC 04 BEACON 5 etc.
A) Be careful with your LO doing too many hard pulls. This alone can hurt your credit. When he pulled the credit report and the numbers/your score was good -- why wouldn't he just use that? I don't understand that. A credit pull by a lender is good for 90 days. To pull again 2 days later doesn't make sense. Even if it was just a "soft pull" on there part or an "update" pull to your score. Others can comment on this but to me it seems strange to pull 2 days later. Unless it was a "rapid rescore," maybe? Which is hit and miss from what I've read. Not sure why they did a double-tap, but doesn't matter: grace period of 30 days if the mortgage inquiries are properly coded (all mine were from 3 different lenders) and there's a 14-45 day rollup period where it will only count as a single scorable inquiry.
B) If your score changes and you don't know why -- it could be the inquiry it could be a mystery! This is what is so hard, I'm finding, in doing the mortgage process. They use different scores and it's very hard to get an accurate picture of what's going on. I've had no luck with MyFico alerts. It will claim more score jumps 7 points because of an address change. Really? (It was a typo that somehow got on there, I have no idea, I never changed my address). You would have to pull your reports (which is a soft pull and doesn't impact you) and analyze it and compare it to the previous one to figure it out and you still might not know. You're right on both counts that take the alerts with a grain of salt, the scores are different; however, FICO isn't capricious, if you have access to the base data it can be figured out virtually every time. Something changed to account for a 7 point difference, might be small and hard to spot (age of tradelines or what not) or something obvious like a balance change.
That said, to me, 673 vs 680 doesn't seem like that much. I don't know if that should equal a .25% rate change. Maybe, I don't know enough about that. Maybe you're in a different tier then. Not sure. That said, if you look at your UTI and stuff hopefully you could get it back up there. 680 is a Tier for virtually every mortgage lender on the planet. Certainly is for conventional and I think FHA loans too though I don't know those as well. To us as consumers, a 7 point swing is whatever, except when we're in the mortgage process and playing on a tier boundary without a gold-plated score to begin with... then it matters a great deal. Big enough that if it were me I'd be scrutenizing my reports, and if it were fixable I'd do so and have them pull again.
@Anonymous wrote:Hi Revelate,
Wow. I should post my scores and ask for your tips. It's so overwhelming and confusing.
My TU bumped up 40 pts and my XPN dropped 44 pts. In one week.
Making for a roller coaster of mortgage-underwriting process.
The only reliable score that matched my lender is the Equifax FICO SCORE WATCH - and here at MyFico - Beacon that is available to consumers.
TU and CreditKarma were closest for TU, under what TU was.
If you really want to know just go pull the 3B report from here.
Yes EQ Scorewatch = Beacon 5.0 and should match explicitly as a result. You cannot get TU 04 anywhere else besides a lender pull, or from here either on a 1B or 3B pull.
EX 98 you can either get from PSECU membership if you happent to live in PA, or from a lender pull, or from here on either a 1B or 3B pull.
Linkies in the URL I posted earlier, frankly ignore every other score you can find on the planet other than what's in that one post as they won't be accurate for 99.9999% of the mortgages underwritten here in the United States.
I don't recall seeing your report data, if you toss it up to this forum we can help you optimize it.
When you have disputes all bets are off for any sort of score prediction or even score accuracy; hence mortgage lenders demanding they be removed.
EX moves differently as it's a different generation of the algorithm than what EQ/TU use, other than the disputes it's hard for me to suggest why they moved in opposite direction as for the big things they work similarly.
Really point in time optimization comes down to two things: getting as many derogatories as you can deleted (the more recent the more better), and then using cash to pay down your debts strategically or sometimes (rarely when we're talking mortgage) getting a consolidation loan. Full report nah, but tradeline summary of current vs credit limit like:
Revolving:
Barclays 64/8400
BOFA 0/2500
etc.
Installment:
Alliant 43/500
as examples from my own report, can help with optimization if you haven't done that already. Otherwise post your negatives in the Rebuilding forum and ask for further help on individual ones if you haven't done so already; you're making good progress.