@Anonymous wrote:
Thanks everyone. I just know that if I go to get a mortgage or car loan my FICO is going to be 40 points or more lower than the FICO 8. Good to know that some firms are using FICO 8. I just haven't run across any of them. If I had known a couple months ago that so many lenders don't use FICO 8, I could have saved some embarrassment of going to a lender and saying, "Oh yeah, my FICO is so and so" only for them to come back and say, "No, you're FICO is actually a lot lower than what you told us."
Perhaps BBS will chime in and explain further. He does a really good job and explaining why your score could be different from what the lender sees. You have hit on one such reason, which is the model could be different.
But even if you know in advance the exact model that was being used, there is also the particular bureau on which the data are being drawn on, You may have seen a FICO score drawn on Experian data, but perhaps the lender is pulling your score based on Equifax data.
And even if you know the exact model and the bureau the lender would use, there's the question of time. If you pull your score today and then a week later go car shopping, your score could have changed a lot in those 7 days. Derogs could have appeared (or gone away), reported CC balances could have changed, loans could have been paid off, etc.
Model, bureau, time -- any one of those three could cause your score to change by 100 points, or even more.
