@bigjim1 wrote:and actually my middle score with myfico is 651-593 = 58 points almost 60 points off....without starting this whole discussion over, i could understand and accept 10-15 maybe even as much as a 20 point variation, but 58 points is just WRONG! and not acceptable....
Blame your employers (the banks) on this one.
If they weren't looking for score variation, there wouldn't be anyway; however, with every lender (including the non-profits) attempting to maximize the amount of money they make, there's going to be lots of different algorithms used as they try to reduce their default rate over their specific customer base and specific loan products.
I agree if you can't get over the FICO score hurdle part of the underwriting guidelines, then you're out. Speaking as someone who missed a mortgage tier and instead of 20% down (which I could do) I would've been at 30% down... which, well, no... so I get wanting to know your scores as precisely as possible; however, lenders even for something simple like a credit card application, typically pull multiple scores, sometimes for the same consumer even and they aren't all FICO.
To toss the third rail into this discussion, it really comes down to credit education. Virtually can get to a FICO of 600 with a year's advance notice even if their file sends small children screaming. With some recent derogs, you can get to 640 even with 2 years at the outside and probably higher than that. If you're starting clean sheet, two years can get you to 740 even.
The problem is too many people only find out about credit when suddenly they need it and it's not available... and that starts a multi-year clock in some cases. I knew I wanted a mortgage in a couple of years, so I checked my credit, found it nowhere close to mortgage qualification, and started building: I didn't make the tier I needed in S. Cali, but if I lived anywhere else in the US I would've met the typical mortgage minimum score after a year. The problem isn't really that the system is setup the way that it is, it's that nobody on the consumer side seems to care until they get hit by the clue-by-four. Granted people don't tend to learn from other people's mistakes but building a credit file isn't particularly difficult if you know it's important enough to care about.
I'm relatively smart by all standard tests I've ever taken, but fact is I didn't care about my credit at all as I paid cash for everything for nearly 20 years... if I'd made some simple changes in my life going back to roughly college, I'd be dialing 800 on my scores and a mortgage would've been easy: life as a whole might not have been better, it would've been different though, but my credit score absolutely would've been improved. End of the day I have nobody else to blame but myself on this, the information was available I just didn't care to look.
