@foofighter74 wrote:
The mortgage lender pulled the same EQ score for my wife that we bought from this site. However, her transunion score that we purchased here was 636, but the lender got a transunion score of 657. That happened to be her high score. The problem is, first of all, the lender pulled a score 21 points higher than the one we bought. Her transunion score on myFICO fell to 628 recently because of a new car lease that happened in November. So, does that mean she got a similar 8 point drop in whatever transunion method the lender pulled to get the 657? Is she 649 now? And of course, you can't buy your experian scores, so who knows what that is.
It's all a huge mess and incredibly ridiculous. The whole credit score industry is a joke because they can't tell people exactly how to maximize their scores...they make people guess, and with trial and error and experience, you can figure out some of the triggers. But if you're basing huge decisions that will impact people's lives in a dramatic way, it should be much more concrete. The fact that mortgage lenders base their decisions in large part on random credit score models that show no consistency from one place to the next just further hammers home that point. Beyond that, these credit reporting agencies seem to think they're not responsible for making sure the credit reports they are offering are accurate, yet they charge people money to verify that reports being used to determine whether they're "qualified" to get a car loan, or a home loan, or rent an apartment or get a cell phone, are accurate.
Seriously? You're offering a product you can't guarantee is even accurate, and you're going to charge money for it? And lenders are going to base their credit decisions in large part on credit reports and scores that they're not sure are accurate?
It's my responsible to make sure my credit report is accurate, but if i actually want to SEE my credit report more than once a year, i have to pay for it? lol.
I had a loan officer recently, in response to my telling him that we were going to pay down our credit cards, tell me not to pay ANY card down to a zero balance as then our credit scores would go down since the reporting agencies would have nothing to base our score on. When i said we were going to leave a balance on one of the five credit cards we have, he said that will hurt our score, having the other cards at zero.
So obviously, there is a certain percentage of people in the lending business who don't have a clue either.
The TU difference was due to the different FICO versions, as mentioned throughout the forums. That's great though that the TU04 was higher. For most, it's lower.
No, you cannot concretely correlate that a drop on one will be equal to a drop on the other version. An assumption can be made because there is no other way to compare, but it won't always be 100% accurate.
As you know there are dozens of FICO versions out there. For example, the auto industry will sometimes use an auto-enhanced FICO that weighs past auto loan borrowing experiences. Another example are CC-enhanced FICO scores that weigh past CC experience. And to confuse things, there are different model years for FICO versions like there are cars. The EQ FICO on here and used by almost all mortgage lenders is 8 years old. There is a newer version only 4 years old and hardly anyone uses it. Lenders can pick and choose what FICO version works best for them. A-la-cart if you will. There is no comformity among lenders because every lender has their own needs when it comes to predicting risk. Some lenders still use the older TU98 FICO version pulled from here. Some prefer the newer ones. It'll always be a YMMV-thing as one FICO version may work for one lender but the same version may not work well for the other.
Your lender is mostly wrong. FICO likes most of your accounts at $0, just not all of your accounts at $0. If you have a dozen CCs, for example, carrying any sort of balance on all 12 will ding you. Always best to leave at least one with a very small balance. Most lenders have only a basic knowledge of FICO scoring. You and most on these forums know a whole lot more and certainly could teach a thing or two within the industry.
