Mortgage Scores

[rhall2009]

  Could anyone tell me if Equifax Beacon 5 and Transunion 04 react the same to utilization. For some reason i thought i remember reading that somewhere however my transunion won't budge and my equifax moves with every decrease in utilization. Feels like my transunion score is stuck. I haven't monitored my experian to find out how thats acting but people that have been through the mortgage process can probably answer this with ease.

[Anonymous]

You mention:

      *  That your TU score is stuck (not moving).

      *  That you are monitoring your TU and EQ score but not EX.

Can you clarify for us what tool you are using to monitor your TU and EQ score?  Apparently it's a tool that doesn't let you see your EX, right?

Also, can you describe what your total CC utilization has been?  Now and in the last four months?   It sounds like it is going down but it's hard to comment in part because you haven't given explicit percents.

[rhall2009]

Well ive bought my 3B report back in july and i had a 591 TU fico 04 score with 80% utilization. I got my october TU fico 04 with 30% utilization and its still 591.

Equifax i had scorepower off the equifax site. Back in july i had a 557 and by October getting down to about 30% im at a 610 beacon 5.

[rhall2009]

Also in July off the 3B report my score was a 607 Experian V2. I haven't bought another experian report since then so i have only been tracking it on CCT.

[Anonymous]

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@rhall2009 wrote:

Well ive bought my 3B report back in july and i had a 591 TU fico 04 score with 80% utilization. I got my october TU fico 04 with 30% utilization and its still 591.

Equifax i had scorepower off the equifax site. Back in july i had a 557 and by October getting down to about 30% im at a 610 beacon 5.

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Wow... that is really strange.  Are you sure that the credit card balances were not merely just at 30% but had also reported at 30% as well?  It can sometimes take a month before all of one's current balances get fully reported to a CRA.  And you are talking about total utilization, right?  Not just utilization on one card?

I have never heard of a FICO model that treats 80% utilization as exactly the same as 30% in terms of score impact.  30% should be gove you a much better score.

Is there anything that could have caused a drop in your TU score in the last four months?  New cards opening?  A late payment?  I am trying to imagine whether you gained some benefit from the lower U but experienced a score hit in another area.

[rhall2009]

I haven't opened any new accounts and no new baddies reported. My 08 scores have been moving just fine. Thats y i wish we had real time updates for mortgage scores (besides equifax) because its hard sometime to find the differences in the reports. Im going to pull another mortgage score when i get under 10% and screen shot them both. Hopefully  it changes because it is a cleaner report than equifax. Also do they take all the reports into account and just the middle score or do they take just the middle score and that report from which the middle score came from?

[Anonymous]

I am pretty sure that, with a serious purchase like a home, the underwriters will do a close manual review of all three reports.  The middle score is the only score that matters, however.

Since you are planning to lower your credit card debt to under 10%, you should do the following things while you are at it:

(1)  Lower it to < 8.99%.  FICO rounds up, and there seems to be some anectdotal reports that 10% is not as good as 9%.

(2)  Try to create as many $0 balances as you can (as long as you have one positive balance).

[Anonymous]

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@rhall2009 wrote:

I haven't opened any new accounts and no new baddies reported. My 08 scores have been moving just fine. Thats y i wish we had real time updates for mortgage scores (besides equifax) because its hard sometime to find the differences in the reports. Im going to pull another mortgage score when i get under 10% and screen shot them both. Hopefully  it changes because it is a cleaner report than equifax. Also do they take all the reports into account and just the middle score or do they take just the middle score and that report from which the middle score came from?

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The use the middle score if you are applying alone, and the low middle score if you apply with a co-borrower. They take all reports into account and they pull a tri-merge report which combines all of the data from each bureau for each tradeline.

[takeshi74]

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@rhall2009 wrote:

I haven't monitored my experian to find out how thats acting but people that have been through the mortgage process can probably answer this with ease.

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Not necessarily.  I just went through it recently and we just had our scores pulled once.  I have no idea how the scores might have changed over time or how various factors might have impacted the scores.