I read these forums quite often and haven't really come across anyone mentioning that they app with a lender, say for a mortgage, just to find out what their FICO scores are. It seems to me that this approach would be beneficial to those who are not in the building/rebuilding phase and are just curious to find out their credit scores. Currently, I am happy with my credit mix so I don't need any new credit, but I am curious as to what my scores are. I was thinking about apping for a mortgage every year just for the scores. Does anyone use this strategy? Are there any downsides to it (besides the hard pull each time)?
Starting Scores (lender pull 3/27/10): 759 (EQ), 752 (TU), 749 (EX)
@pizzadude wrote:
@tpatterson2k9 wrote:I read these forums quite often and haven't really come across anyone mentioning that they app with a lender, say for a mortgage, just to find out what their FICO scores are. It seems to me that this approach would be beneficial to those who are not in the building/rebuilding phase and are just curious to find out their credit scores. Currently, I am happy with my credit mix so I don't need any new credit, but I am curious as to what my scores are. I was thinking about apping for a mortgage every year just for the scores. Does anyone use this strategy? Are there any downsides to it (besides the hard pull each time)?
Well you typically would have to have a mortgage application open with a lender for them to pull your scores ~ and applying for a mortgage may involve an upfront application fee. I doubt if lenders would leave a loan app perpetually open just so you can check your scores, so I don't think you could do this for very long.
Also it costs them to pull your credit, typically they recoup this fee from your application fee and/or from credit reporting fees which you pay at closing.
+1
@RobertEG wrote:What a lendor pulls to evaluate a mortgage app may not be based on the same FICO algorithm as what other creditors and consumers pull. Specialized creditor industries get specialized industry-specific scores. FICO is not a single algorithm, it has many, many flavors.
So apping for a mortgage just to get the mortgage-based FICO score would be kinda pointless, in my opinion, unless you are about to enter the mortgage app process.
You can get traditional FICO scores used for most creditor decisions without need for a mortgage-based score.
Going through the mortgage app process just to get a score that is othewise not available to you seems kinda extreme to me.
The next time that mortgage company sees you at the door, they are not apt to be very receptive.
+1
@Anonymous wrote:you can get your three scores if you attain a pre-approval and that's before the application fee
Does that cost money? How does that work?
From what daboss said, this is exactly what I was referring to. When I got preapproved for a mortgage loan, they gave me all three "FICO" scores, and when I checked my EQ score on myFico, the difference was only a matter of 4 or 5 points. To me, it seems like the mortgage based FICO scores are much closer to actual FICO scores than getting a score from places like Credit Karma, Transunion, or the like. It is my opinon that I don't feel like consumers should have to pay for access to their credit scores that make so much of an impact in their daily financial lives. If it takes a hard inquiry every year to get scores reasonably close to your FICOs than why not? Since I plan to apply for a mortgage in the next year or so anyway, I feel like it is good to know where I stand as far as my "mortgage-based" FICO scores are concerened. It seems pretty ridiculous to me that there are so many different versions of FICO scores that it makes it difficult to even pinpoint where you stand with any one particular lender, so why pay for any kind of FICO score than one lender might not use over another? Just my two cents...