topic Re: FICO Sucks - how do I get new scoring factors with the $25.00/month score watch? in myFICO® Product Feedback

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

ChrisinKC — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 03:44:10 GMT

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.

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

NRB525 — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 04:22:22 GMT

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

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

CraigHwk — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 13:48:46 GMT

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.

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

KellyP25721 — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 14:03:37 GMT

@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.

+1 Yeah, what he said!

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

ChrisinKC — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 14:56:39 GMT

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.

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

KellyP25721 — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 15:11:25 GMT

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.

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

ChrisinKC — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 16:11:46 GMT

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.

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

KellyP25721 — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 17:55:04 GMT

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.

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

ChrisinKC — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 18:49:03 GMT

@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.

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

@KellyP25721 wrote:

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

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.

@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.

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.

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

KellyP25721 — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 00:23:05 GMT

@ChrisinKC wrote:
@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.

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

@KellyP25721 wrote:

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

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.

@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.

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.

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.

FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

ChrisinKC — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 23:25:14 GMT

So the top item affecting my score was something about heavy usage of my available revolving credit. I have $78,000 in credit lines and I had $17,800 spread across them. Some were new cards with 0% interest for 18 months, and rest were 0% for several more years on furniture purchases.

Since I'm trying to buy a house, I reviewed the items affecting my score from all 3 credit bureaus, then ran the score simulator on FICO's website. The following is what was displayed in the simulator in regards to the option of paying down credit card debt:

How you manage your revolving accounts (credit cards, department store credit cards, revolving lines of credit) is heavily weighted in the FICO® Score. FICO Scores evaluate your revolving accounts in a variety of ways, including comparing your balance to your available credit, as well as looking at the number of accounts with a balance. A general rule to remember: consistently carrying lower balances on revolving accounts will generate positive points for a score.

This simulation shows what could happen to your FICO Score if you pay down 6,334 of your overall credit card balance over a period of one month. The simulation took into account both your lower balances and the aging of your credit history. In general, a score will increase as credit history lengthens and consistent behavior paying down your credit card balances is demonstrated.

(Note, even if you pay your credit cards in full each month, the balance shown on your credit report may not be $0. Instead, it will reflect your account balance as reported by the lender to the credit bureau, which is typically the balance on your latest monthly statement.)

ABOUT THE FICO® SCORE SIMULATOR

The simulator and simulated score are provided for informational purposes only and is intended to approximate the impact of various scenarios on your FICO® Score – assuming all other factors stay the same. Using this tool, you can get a better understanding of how various positive and negative actions you can take could affect your FICO Score.

Your actual score, and the impact of any action taken, results from a complex interaction of FICO's scoring methodologies and the information on your credit report, some of which changes daily. Also, please note the results of simulating different scenarios are not necessarily cumulative. In other words, simulating two different scenarios, each of which individually could raise your FICO Score by 20 points, will probably not collectively raise your FICO Score by 40 points. Information on your authorized user accounts are not considered in the FICO Score simulations.

When I ran the simulator, it said that my Trans Union score would go from 727 to 747. Although I didn't expect an exact 20 point increase since FICO would never tell exactly how much the improvement would be, I did expect a good 10 - 15 point gain. I think it's reasonable to expect half of what the simulator had indicated.

So, I paid down $6,334 in one month, exactly as I had indicated in the simulator. And what do you know, my score went up 6 points. Six points. Not sixteen, or sixty, but SIX!

What a load of crap. That simulator is a joke and doesn't provide anywhere NEAR the results as what actually happens. Sure glad I used that as a resource to base my decision on to pay off over $13,000, to get to a goal score of 762.

Looks like I should be happy if I don't LOSE 35 points after paying off all but 4.9% of my debt.

FICO sucks.

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

Booboo71 — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:14:28 GMT

Are you sure everything has updated with creditors? I get updates all the time because they update throughout the month. Also 6 points up is better then -6 points down! Good luck!

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

vanillabean — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:38:50 GMT

I don't think your debt (17800-6334=11466? util is 11466/78000=14.7%?) alone is responsible for your FICO score (727+6=733?).

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

NRB525 — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:52:18 GMT

I'm not sure it's worth trying to explain anything because when an attitude walks into the forum, there's not much to say to change that attitude.

FICO is what it is; a complex algorithm which tries to summarize the multitude of potential credit history combinations of millions of Americans over the varying time spans of each of their lives, and you can either try to learn about all the aspects of it, while keeping an open mind to understanding the possible explanations, to take a reasoned approach to understand it, or rant. Your choice.

Cheers!

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

ChrisinKC — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:54:19 GMT

Booboo71 wrote:

Are you sure everything has updated with creditors? I get updates all the time because they update throughout the month. Also 6 points up is better then -6 points down! Good luck!

Yes, I am 100% positive that everything has been updated with Trans Union, which is the score that I was simulating. My Equifax score went up 15 points, Experian went up 16 points, and Trans Union went up 6 after the payoff.

Maybe I don't have my notification settings for Trans Union setup correctly (although I've looked and can't find any notification settings for any except Equifax), but the only notifcations from TU that I get specify what my total balance is for ALL of my credit cards, and I received one of those today and the amount reflected that payoff.

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

ChrisinKC — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:55:29 GMT

I choose to not accept a flawed system, as everyone on the planet should be doing.

@NRB525 wrote:
I'm not sure it's worth trying to explain anything because when an attitude walks into the forum, there's not much to say to change that attitude.

FICO is what it is; a complex algorithm which tries to summarize the multitude of potential credit history combinations of millions of Americans over the varying time spans of each of their lives, and you can either try to learn about all the aspects of it, while keeping an open mind to understanding the possible explanations, to take a reasoned approach to understand it, or rant. Your choice.

Cheers!

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

ChrisinKC — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 02:01:00 GMT

@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
I don't think your debt (17800-6334=11466? util is 11466/78000=14.7%?) alone is responsible for your FICO score (727+6=733?).

You're right. Yet another reason for them lowering my score was because my balance on my non-mortgage was too high, which is another scam. I put down $15,000 on my truck when I bought it, and have been making 0% interest payments ever since. Even though I have tons of equity in my vehicle loan due to the huge down payment and the 0% interest payments made on the loan, they're still screwing me out of points. What would be FAIR is if they compared the VALUE of the vehicle to the loan balance. That would make more sense.

Again, FICO sucks.

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

AzaleaB — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 14:46:05 GMT

Patience, OP. Sometimes there is a delay with significantly decreased utilization if it has a much higher % for a period of time. Somewhere FICO people talked about this, possibly, over the next couple of months, more points will come. It's often said here that FICO has no memory with respect to utilization but according to FICO staff discussion, sometimes it does for some profiles and there is a delay.

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

ChrisinKC — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 14:54:27 GMT

@ AzaleaB wrote:

Patience, OP. Sometimes there is a delay with significantly decreased utilization if it has a much higher % for a period of time. Somewhere FICO people talked about this, possibly, over the next couple of months, more points will come. It's often said here that FICO has no memory with respect to utilization but according to FICO staff discussion, sometimes it does for some profiles and there is a delay.

I have no patience, and I shouldn't need to have patience.

My purchase contract on the house we just bought said that I would be pre-approved within 30 days of the contract date.

I have to apply for my mortgage within the first week of May, and I'm closing on my house on June 30.

I don't have time for FICO to be playing games with my score. Yes, I could get pre-approved in May and then run my credit again before closing, however each time my credit is ran they will deduct points for that. Since I believe I would be right on the line, deducting points for running the score will be enough to prevent me from reaching the 740+ range for the best APR.

Again, FICO sucks.

Re: FICO Sucks and so does their score simulator

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 22:39:51 GMT

I would give it a little more time. I normally take the high & low number, throw those out & get a middle score which is normally what it will be. But it does take a little time for everything to report & your score to go up.