topic Re: Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score? in Understanding FICO® Scoring

Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score?

ridgebackpilot — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 17:36:42 GMT

Perhaps someone can explain a puzzling discrepancy in my TU FICO score that I ran across yesterday?

I went to my local Mercedes Benz dealership to buy a CPO car. As expected, they pulled my TU FICO Auto 8 score. Interestingly, the dealership paperwork said my TU FICO Auto 8 score was 741. However, myFICO shows my TU FICO Auto 8 score as 697. That's a pretty big discrepancy of 44 points! But since it worked in my favor, I didn't complain. Anyone venture to guess the reason for this magnitude difference??

Re: Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score?

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 17:56:11 GMT

Sure. The scores are different because they were generated on different days. Between the two dates, one or more things changed on the TU report. If you had a TU report from each date you could likely work out what the changes were.

The changes could be tons of things. No one here could hazard a reasonable guess without seeing the reports.

Re: Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score?

kxkxkxx — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 18:02:45 GMT

CreditGuyInDixie is 100% correct!

When they pulled your report, they got a "refresh" at that moment...so my guess is, 1 or more things happened, such as age of accounts, maybe an inquiry or 2 fell off...could be many things...with a 44 point increase, multiple things may have happened.

Congrats though! I am sure that was awesome to see!

Re: Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score?

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:58:51 GMT

What ^ they said. Sometimes it takes myFico a while to update. My Equifax score didn't update for a good 1.5 months, and I didn't find out my score there until I applied for a loan and discovered that it had increased by 10 points from when I last saw it. It's still not updated on myFico

Re: Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score?

ridgebackpilot — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 22:31:09 GMT

Thanks for the quick responses! I'm sure you all are exactly right.

Wow, I was under the impression that myFICO was more timely than that! It's been two days and I still haven't received a myFICO alert that there were two separate HPs on TU. Mercedes Benz pulled my TU FICO Auto 8 score twice despite the fact that I specifically told them they were allowed only one HP! First, the dealership itself pulled my TU score to verify that it was high enough to forward the deal to MBFS. Then MBFS pulled my TU score again to lock in financing.

I received an alert within moments from Capital One's CreditWise, showing the two HPs. But they use FAKO scores so that wasn't particularly helpful other than the timely alerts...

Re: Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score?

iv — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 23:39:45 GMT

@ridgebackpilot wrote:
Thanks for the quick responses! I'm sure you all are exactly right.

Wow, I was under the impression that myFICO was more timely than that!

Also, don't forget that only the base FICO 8 scores update at all in-between full reports - the Auto (and all other) versions do not refresh automatically - only when you pull a monthly/quarterly (or paid) report.

Depending on your plan and when you last pulled, the Auto scores could be up to three months out of date.

@ridgebackpilot wrote:
It's been two days and I still haven't received a myFICO alert that there were two separate HPs on TU.
[...]
I received an alert within moments from Capital One's CreditWise, showing the two HPs. But they use FAKO scores so that wasn't particularly helpful other than the timely alerts...

Yeah, unfortunately, MyFICO does tend to be delayed in flagging alerts that various free services sometimes alarm on in real-time. (I've gotten CreditKarma HP alerts in minutes, vs MyFICO alerts for the same HPs in days.)

@ridgebackpilot wrote:
Mercedes Benz pulled my TU FICO Auto 8 score twice despite the fact that I specifically told them they were allowed only one HP! First, the dealership itself pulled my TU score to verify that it was high enough to forward the deal to MBFS. Then MBFS pulled my TU score again to lock in financing.

Par for the course... If anything, it's surprising they kept it down to just the two. If they hadn't kept it to just the captive lender, you could have had a dozen.

Thankfully, HPs don't really matter much, disappear quickly (one year for FICO, two years from the reports), and are de-duplicated (if tagged correctly).

Re: Big Discrepancy in TU FICO Score?

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 05:02:55 GMT

@ridgebackpilot wrote:

I received an alert within moments from Capital One's CreditWise, showing the two HPs. But they use FAKO scores so that wasn't particularly helpful other than the timely alerts...

It's always nice to hear when a completely free service and one that provides non-FICO scores to boot provides alerts faster than the paid MF service. Thanks for sharing that info.