FICO Sucks - how do I get new scoring factors with the $25.00/month score watch?

[ChrisinKC]

I currently subscribe to the $25/month scorewatch for all 3 credit scores from the scammers myFICO.

Does anyone know why my scoring factors aren't updated with each new score?  My score has changed several times in the past 2 weeks, but my scoring factors are based off of information on the 4/3 credit report.

Do I need to pay these scammers more money for a new credit report each time my score changes to know what the new scoring factors are?

By the way, if you couldn't tell, I think FICO is thebiggest scamming company on the face of the planet. 

My scores now are 720, 727 and 740.  Decent scores, however  FICO is still a scamming company.

My non-mortgage balance is too high?  Really?  Maybe it's because I put $15,000 as a down payment on a 0% interest loan you idiots.  Why am I not getting credit for THAT?  Why doesn't it say that my balance compared to the VALUE is SUPER LOW and then GET points for THAT?  Answer:  Because FICO wants to keep your score low so banks can charge higher interest. 

Why is it that I'm suddenly a higher risk of defaulting on a payment when I've been making full payments on time for 20+ years?  How is it that my income is not included?  Someone making $10,000/year and has a $1,000 balance is MUCH more likely to default than someone who's making $100,000+ with a $1,000 balance.

Sorry for my rant.  I hate FICO and I hate having to pay them ANYTHING and succumb to them to buy a house.

[NRB525]

The full CR that you got when you first signed up hasn't really changed much. Any worthwhile changes to the file, which have a meaningful effect (or sometimes, no effect at all) show up in the Alerts that you get. For the most part, these are just balance changes.

If you app for a new card, you'll see the HP Alert for that.

if you get a new card from the app, when that starts reporting a balance, anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months after the app depending on the speed of the lender, you'll see that in an alert from at least one (sometimes only one) bureau.

If you miss a payment, I'm sure there's an alert for that, though I don't plan to test it and it seems unlikely that anyone paying for the service would experience that particular alert

So, over time, you can reconstruct your file based on these alerts.

And, as a perspective on this whole thing, MyFICO is merely providing you a service to see the changes to your file on a near-real-time basis, so if any thing goes really sideways, you are aware of it pronto.

The FICO score itself is there for a purpose as well, as part of the larger economy. In order for banks to be able to efficiently provide you with great lending rates on credit cards, when they don't know you from Adam and Eve, they need some trusted method to at least estimate your ability to pay. While you don't get any credit for your annual income in the raw FICO score, it doesn't really matter much on small credit card loans. Larger CL on credit cards, yeah, they'll get more information about your income.

And you betcha you will be proving every last dollar of income when you app for that mortgage. The mortgage company will certainly connect all the dots in your financial world, FICO being only a small one of many dots they have to connect. Your full hearing will come soon enough

Cheers

[CraigHwk]

I find that MyFico pairs great with CreditKarma.  I use MyFico for the scores, which are true FICO scores and then use CK for the details of my credit report and ignore the worthless scores it provides.

[KellyP25721]

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@CraigHwk wrote:

I find that MyFico pairs great with CreditKarma.  I use MyFico for the scores, which are true FICO scores and then use CK for the details of my credit report and ignore the worthless scores it provides.

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+1 Yeah, what he said!  

[ChrisinKC]

The data on the credit reports does not  specify what's hurting your score.  Each time my score is updated, I expect that the reasons for my score would also be updated, but they're not.

They say that the scoring factors are based on the data from each of my 3 credit reports from 4/3, rather than basing it off the new information that has caused my score to increase over the past couple of weeks due to paying off debt.

[KellyP25721]

Correct, the 3B monitoring service from MyFico only monitors your scores and gives you one actual report per year which you used when you first signed up.  If you want updated reports, you must purchase them which gets costly.  That's why the suggestion to use MyFico 3B to get your actual scores and then use CreditKarma and it's tools to see what's actually impacting your scores.

[ChrisinKC]

I guess I don't know why FICO wouldn't provide that information as a part of their monitoring service whenever a score is updated.  They just want a reason to charge more money for the information, even though they had that information due to the updated score.   A new credit report is not required for them to update your score, so there's no reason why we should have to pay for a new credit report to find out the revised reasons that are affecting our score, each time our score changes.  Why does it seem like no one else cares about this besides me?  Does everyone else just want to accept getting screwed by a system that you're forced into?

Forced meaning that if you want a loan from any bank in the United States, they will check your score. There’s no way around it.

There’s also nothing that FICO provides that specifies what the exact consequence of an action will have on your score. With scores being used to determine so much in people’s lives, I have no idea why EVERYONE wouldn’t want to know EVERYTHING about how their score is calculated. Making financial decisions is impossible without ALL of the information. They don’t necessarily need to provide written text on how scores are calculated, but their simulation should be for about every possible scenario and then the actual result of carrying out the action should match exactly to what the simulator said would happen for that action.

For example, if I’m trying to get a house loan (which I am), I want the absolute highest score I can get. Right now, my scores are >720 but < 740. Scores 740+ provide the lowest APR at the bank I’m going through, and probably most other banks. With my 720+ score, I had $17,000 debt, and I paid off $13,000. DTI ratio is not a concern, as I make WAAAAAAAY more than what my monthly payments were on that debt. In addition, 90% of that debt was being paid with 0% interest.

The ONLY reason I decided to pay that debt off was in HOPE that my scores would increase to 740+ so I could qualify for the lowest APR on the mortgage I’m about to apply for. However, there’s not a single place that I can go to guarantee that if I paid down the balance by $13,000 that my score would go up to 740+. That information should be available, and should be REQUIRED to be available so financial decisions can be made.

Since I used that $13,000 to pay off 0% interest credit cards, I can’t use that same $13,000 for a down payment on my house, so in essence I’ll be paying mortgage interest on that $13,000 instead of paying 0% interest when that $13,000 was on my credit cards. If my scores don’t go up to 740+, I’ll be paying even higher interest rates on that same $13,000 (3.875% vs 0%).

If a simulation existed (which is absolutely should) that told me that even by paying down $13,000 that my score would not go to 740+, I would not have paid off that balance and would have used it as a down payment on my house.

This is just 1 of many many many many etc etc etc examples of how FICO and the banks are screwing people and how the entire credit scoring system needs to be changed. I really hate FICO and everything about it.

[KellyP25721]

I don't think that's it not that people don't care, it's just that the ideal world you mention doesn't and won't exist as long the the CRA's are in the buiness to make money.  If they put out a simulator that exactly replicated score changes based on the the different inputs, somebody would sit and backward engineer their formulas and remove the CRA's competitive advantage...thereby causing them to loose money.  As long as the CRA's are in the money making business, I just don't see that happening!  This is pretty much the same reason that Coca Cola & KFC guard their recipes so closely.

If it were me in your situation, I would have talked to a loan officer at the bank before I did anything.  They should have been able to tell you what the best course of action was to increase your scores before locking in your mortgage.

[ChrisinKC]

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@KellyP25721 wrote:

I don't think that's it not that people don't care, it's just that the ideal world you mention doesn't and won't exist as long the the CRA's are in the buiness to make money.  

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Ding ding ding.  And that's why we need a different system. 

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@KellyP25721 wrote:

This is pretty much the same reason that Coca Cola & KFC guard their recipes so closely.

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Comparing secret recipies to hiding information about how people's credit scores are calculated is far off from being right.  I may not know how to make KFC's chicken at home, but I'm also not losing thousands of dollars every year of my life because of it.  If I want to cook chicken at home, I'll find a recipie online and use it for free.

I do not have the same choice for credit scores, in fact no one does.  We're all forced into this secretive system and we're all judged by it.  I'm pretty sure that if you were to be hired by some secret system, everybody would be up in arms about it.  Well, at least the unemployed would be, and the rest wouldn't care until it directly impacted them.

I don't care if someone could reverse engineer their system.  It's a farce and it doesn't take into account everything that it should, and it takes away points for not having a balance.  Sorry, I don't think that there's anyone in the world who would think their score should be lower because they have no debt.  FICO says that your score is based off of the risk of defaulting on a payment, but when you have no debt there isn't any payment to be made, and therefore would have ZERO risk in defaulting on a required payment that doesn't exist.  Again, FICO is just LOOKING to find ways to reduce scores so banks can make more money, because banks are the major users of FICO and therefore FICO must do what banks want or banks will move on to something different.  It's a freaking scam - every single last part of it, and I really do not understand how people can be so dumb in accepting it.

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@KellyP25721 wrote:

If it were me in your situation, I would have talked to a loan officer at the bank before I did anything.  They should have been able to tell you what the best course of action was to increase your scores before locking in your mortgage.

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I have spoken with many people over my life about credit and not a single person who I've spoken with knows any more than I do.  The bank could have "guessed" on what the best course of action would be to improve my score, but there would definitly not been any guarantees. 

If FICO is going to be used by banks to make financial decisions, then the people have the right to know it and understand it.  If you're ok with not knowing and just accepting the flawed system the way that it is, that's fine, but that makes you a part of the problem.

[KellyP25721]

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@ChrisinKC wrote:

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@KellyP25721 wrote:

I don't think that's it not that people don't care, it's just that the ideal world you mention doesn't and won't exist as long the the CRA's are in the buiness to make money.  

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Ding ding ding.  And that's why we need a different system. 

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@KellyP25721 wrote:

This is pretty much the same reason that Coca Cola & KFC guard their recipes so closely.

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Comparing secret recipies to hiding information about how people's credit scores are calculated is far off from being right.  I may not know how to make KFC's chicken at home, but I'm also not losing thousands of dollars every year of my life because of it.  If I want to cook chicken at home, I'll find a recipie online and use it for free.

I do not have the same choice for credit scores, in fact no one does.  We're all forced into this secretive system and we're all judged by it.  I'm pretty sure that if you were to be hired by some secret system, everybody would be up in arms about it.  Well, at least the unemployed would be, and the rest wouldn't care until it directly impacted them.

I don't care if someone could reverse engineer their system.  It's a farce and it doesn't take into account everything that it should, and it takes away points for not having a balance.  Sorry, I don't think that there's anyone in the world who would think their score should be lower because they have no debt.  FICO says that your score is based off of the risk of defaulting on a payment, but when you have no debt there isn't any payment to be made, and therefore would have ZERO risk in defaulting on a required payment that doesn't exist.  Again, FICO is just LOOKING to find ways to reduce scores so banks can make more money, because banks are the major users of FICO and therefore FICO must do what banks want or banks will move on to something different.  It's a freaking scam - every single last part of it, and I really do not understand how people can be so dumb in accepting it.

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@KellyP25721 wrote:

If it were me in your situation, I would have talked to a loan officer at the bank before I did anything.  They should have been able to tell you what the best course of action was to increase your scores before locking in your mortgage.

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I have spoken with many people over my life about credit and not a single person who I've spoken with knows any more than I do.  The bank could have "guessed" on what the best course of action would be to improve my score, but there would definitly not been any guarantees. 

If FICO is going to be used by banks to make financial decisions, then the people have the right to know it and understand it.  If you're ok with not knowing and just accepting the flawed system the way that it is, that's fine, but that makes you a part of the problem.

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I never said credit reporting couldn't use some transparency and reform, but I am humbled and bow to your superior intellect. Since you have it all figured out, why are you bothering with this site as a source of  information?  Let me know how your reform campaign works out for you.