So I'm going through the mortgage process myself and have been shocked by the scoring. The Fico 08 scores for me were 60-70 points higher then the mortgage weighted score that you get from the newest 3 bureau pull from here. The mortgage weighted scores matched up exactly to what my mortgage guy pulled. So if you're getting a mortgage then buy the 3 bureau because it's worth it.
With that said Fair Isaac has a new score coming out called the Fico 09. It's supposedly not going to knock you for medical collections. If this happens I bet the CA's will "forget" to note that accounts are medical debt. The reason why companies haven't used Fico 08 is because they have to pay for it. Maybe with the 09 coming out they'll upgrade to the 08 score.
Starting Score: 625 TU MyFico 604EQ My Fico 596 EX USAA FAKO Feb 2013
@zulutulu wrote:my scores dropped across the board, all 3 bureaus. I had also paid pretty much everything down to a zero balance, which I am starting to see is naughty. Case in point, 2 of my card accounts just refreshed and now have a few hundred dollars balance showing. Equifax score went up 8 points. I smell a rat.
To your earlier post, I lost 15-20 points acrossed the board on FICO 8 when my auto loan was paid off and I lost another 4-5 points when a secured installment loan was subsequently paid off. I had two other secured installment loans reporting (though fairly recently) and a total of 17 tradelines on my report. On the flipside, my EQ Beacon 5.0 which is a score I actually care about didn't blink, and this past month has never been higher even with suboptimal balances reporting.
As for all revolving accounts being zero, it is a straight negative... somewhat absurd from the consumer perspective, but it's a well known and tested fact likely for historical reasons in the algorithms. Fairly recently (within the last three years) all of the bureuas have added the data field to report actual payments for a given month, which can demonstrate activity, but not all lenders are reporting that data so far and as such at least algorithms such as FICO 8 (which was released in 2008, well before this information was available) don't take it into account. FICO 9 *might* but I'm not holding my breath, it's likely something that won't be changed in the algorithm until FICO 10 at the earliest.
