Help me understand my FICO 9 Score Please

Anonymous · ‎06-09-2017

Okay so Pulled my FICO 8 from CCT for EQ and got my FICO 9 free from NFCU.

However, my FICO 8 gives me a 673 score while FICO 9 for EQ is 619

That's a huge discrepancy. So what exactly happened to drop me 50+ points between FICO 8 and 9 I thought they were very similar.

These are the things I think are dragging me down:

Accounts opened in the last 2 years:

6 Installment loans (4 student, 1 PIF and 5 still paying)
8 Revolvers Opened (6 of them store cards)
Only 2 HP's showing

1 CO from 2011
1 Collection related to the above CO from 2011

My payment history shows 100% payments made on time, 0 late's within the last 7 years. Currently used 31% of total available credit (yes I know probably helpful to pay it at least under 30% and I will).

Anonymous · ‎06-10-2017

Is the amount on the collection < $100 and is it unpaid? Small unpaid collections are ignored in FICO 8, though they might be counted in FICO 9. (Paid collections are ignored in FICO 9.) I am trying to think of a clear scenario where FICO 8 would give you a clear edge on FICO 9, and a small unpaid collection might be one.

If you do decide to pay down your CC debt further (certainly a good decision) I'd make sure to get it under 28.99%. Getting just under 30% (as you suggested) will likely give you no help.

Anonymous · ‎06-10-2017

The collection is for $1,800 its unpaid and it's from 2011.

I'm trying to figure out what could cause a 50+ point difference too. Something's isn't adding up. Both scores were from today too.

Thanks for the advice about paying it down.

Anonymous · ‎06-10-2017

Thanks for clarifying the size of the collection.

Here's a guess as to what may be going on. FICO 9 places just as much weight on Payment History (which includes lates, chargeoffs, and collections) as does FICO 8. But in FICO 9 the developers decided to exclude all kinds of of PM sub-factors altogether, such as all paid collections (of any type or size) and all medical collections -- things that FICO 8 includes. This means that the remaining derogs (lates, unpaid collections, etc.) would necessarily have to be strengthened in their impact. If FICO 9 did not do that, then Payment History would become a weaker category as a whole.

So to focus just on collections for a second, if FICO 9 is going to exclude all paid collections and also all unpaid medical collections, then the remaining collections (unpaid nonmedical collections) will likely hurt you more in model 9 than in model 8.

The practical upshot is that if you were to pay off the collection entirely, then FICO 9 would treat it as if it never happened. Of course, an even better strategy would be to see if you can simply endure having the FICO 8 and FICO 9 and mortgage scores that you have now for the next year (though you can improve them a good deal by paying off your CC debt). Then, in 2018, your collection and CO will fall off and your scores will go up sharply -- for all models. And your FICO 8 and 9 will become far closer.

Anonymous · ‎06-10-2017

A 50 point difference isn't remarkable at all. If you look at all your various FICO Scores on a MyFico 1B pull, you could see variances as high as 100 points between any two scoring methods.

Since almost no one uses FICO 09, it isn't all that relevant yet. Keep rebuilding, keep score tweaking on FICO 08 and eventually it won't matter. By the time creditors move to 09 you'll be in prime territory.

Revelate · ‎06-10-2017

@Anonymous wrote:
A 50 point difference isn't remarkable at all. If you look at all your various FICO Scores on a MyFico 1B pull, you could see variances as high as 100 points between any two scoring methods.

Since almost no one uses FICO 09, it isn't all that relevant yet. Keep rebuilding, keep score tweaking on FICO 08 and eventually it won't matter. By the time creditors move to 09 you'll be in prime territory.

Yeah like 3 lenders.

Here's a thought: if FICO 9 is excluding paid collections, and medical collections have been downplayed, might it be weighting unpaid regular collections more significantly?

I had paid my collections prior to FICO 9's being released, let alone to us in the monitoring solutions, so I never saw that.

Out of curiosity, mind posting the EQ FICO 9 reason code that NFCU gives Matt? I suspect it's the PR/collection one on top, but might be interesting to see.

Anonymous · ‎06-10-2017

@Revelate wrote:

Here's a thought: if FICO 9 is excluding paid collections, and medical collections have been downplayed, might it be weighting unpaid regular collections more significantly?

Yeah, that's what I suggested this morning. I think that's very likely to be true.

Anonymous · ‎06-10-2017

But then weighting just one collection form 6 years ago so much that it drags me down 50+ more points than FICO 8 is already dragging me down for this collections? Doesn't make sense.

I know Scores can vary but that's typically to to variance in information contained in your reports. If all reports show 100% the same information the variance I believe would be +/- 10 points.

Here's the reason codes NFCU's FICO 9 gives:

Key Factors Impacting Your 06/09/2017 FICO® Score
Too many accounts with balances
Serious delinquency, and public record or collection filed

So for the first reason I have about 14 student loans each for about $2,300 from 2-4 years ago. Other than that the only one with a balance is one credit card.

For the delinquency it's really old so it should lose a lot of weight over time. It appears that way in FICO 8's scoring anyways.

I have no other collections paid or unpaid. And 0 late payments shown within the last 7 years.

Anonymous · ‎06-10-2017

Hi Matt! My comments in blue below.

@Anonymous wrote:
But then weighting just one collection form 6 years ago so much that it drags me down 50+ more points than FICO 8 is already dragging me down for this collections? Doesn't make sense.

Revelate and I are not saying that the sole explanation for why your FICO 9 would lower is that FICO 9 treats unpaid collections more harshly than does FICO 8. We are suggesting it may well be part of it. I also suggested that FICO 9 might be treating your CO more harshly than does FICO 8. See if you can revisit what I wrote earlier. If FICO 9 ends up eliminating stuff that hurts your score in the Payment History category, the stuff that remains (from that category) necessarily would have to matter more -- otherwise the category as a whole would be weakened.

I know Scores can vary but that's typically to to variance in information contained in your reports. If all reports show 100% the same information the variance I believe would be +/- 10 points.

Scores can vary in at least a couple ways. You are right that a very specific model (e.g. FICO 8 Classic) can vary from bureau to bureau, which can be caused by differences in the data but also differences in how that model was implemented by that bureau.

Bureau-to-bureau differences, however, are not what ABCD was talking about. He was saying that, assuming you fix the data with just one bureau, scores will vary from model to model, sometimes quite a lot. E.g. EQ mortgage score vs. EQ FICO 8 Classic vs EQ FICO 8 Bankcard Enhanced. He was saying big differences between models are actually quite common, and a difference of 50 points is not strange.

Here's the reason codes NFCU's FICO 9 gives:

Key Factors Impacting Your 06/09/2017 FICO® Score
Too many accounts with balances
Serious delinquency, and public record or collection filed

So for the first reason I have about 14 student loans each for about $2,300 from 2-4 years ago. Other than that the only one with a balance is one credit card.

That's interesting. You may be right that you have so many accounts with balances (including installments) that FICO 9 is bothered by that, perhaps more than FICO 8 is.

For the delinquency it's really old so it should lose a lot of weight over time. It appears that way in FICO 8's scoring anyways.

It is indeed losing weight over time. But perhaps it loses weight a bit faster in FICO 8 rather than FICO 9. This is us attempting to peer into the secret workings of the FICO 9 model so it is hard to say.

I have no other collections paid or unpaid. And 0 late payments shown within the last 7 years.

Again, practically you have a slam dunk decision, which is to pay off CC debt and wait till the derogs fall off in a year. Those two things will improve all your scores a lot.

Revelate · ‎06-10-2017

Too many accounts with balances

Hrm. Maybe CC's and installments did get conflated in FICO 9 if there's only one CC reporting, think TT was mentioning seeing something like that on some model but I forget which.

I think numbers of accounts with balances is my next test as I was planning to try to see if my pretty scorecard post tax lien removal behaves differently than my old ones, and see what FICO 9 does on a bureau (probably Experian).