@Tony275 wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:Hi - I'm Rod, CEO of ReadyForZero. Thanks for trying and discussing our premium products here!
We use the VantageScore 3.0 provided by Experian as part of our automated premium products. This score is not an educational score and is used by lenders. With that said, it is not the FICO score but it is definitely not an educational score. This was an explicit decision. Remember, when lenders or other creditors consider your credit they use different scores as well as scores developed internally that may be informed in part by external credit bureau scores. VantageScore 3.0 is based on the same FICO range (300-850) although it is not a FICO score.
To learn more about the VantageScore 3.0, please check out these links:
http://your.vantagescore.com/understand
http://your.vantagescore.com/who-uses-our-model
http://thescore.vantagescore.com/article/98 (an interview I did that discusses some of these topics as well)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VantageScore#VantageScore_vs_FICO_score
Feel free to reach out to myself or my team directly if you have other questions as well.
Rod
FICO Score or not, that's good public relations! Props to you, sir!!
I still intend on using the site to help me keep focus on paying down my bills and not adding more debt. Though, I'm unsure if I'll go ahead with the paid service at this point. $12.95 seems a bit unjustified for me right now.
Thanks for all the information everyone!
Think it rather depends upon what you need: reading through their literature their service was really designed as a financial life simplifier, rather than a credit score / report / tracking service much as we have on this site. Getting notifications for upcoming bills doesn't entirely suck (I once did similar with Google Calendar till I simply started paying anything that had a due date twice a month) and the premium service automates the bill payments... though given that the banks have much of that through their BillPay interface, they aren't particularly customizable.
If I had to pick any non-FICO score to care about, it'd be either Vantage 2.0 or 3.0; for that matter, I care more about my VS than roughly 1/3 of the algorithms that FICO sells (anything '95/98 = yawn, mostly unused industry options like the FICO '08 mortgage-enhanced and the like): it's not pervasive in the industry but Chase underwrote my Freedom application with it (among other scores probably, they provided me a VS 2.0 though in the pre-recon letter).
That all said, in my case only having 12 accounts currently and given how easy most services now are (other than FIA, sigh, no mobile app I can find), automatic payments aren't a terribly exciting thing for me; however, if I could integrate other things into a more general recurring payment system (insurance, mortgage, personal, etc) that might have more value if either I had a busier life (not now, will have again in the future) or if I had 36 tradelines or whatever. Given that I have a static report, the service might wind up being solid value-wise compared to something similarly priced like Scorewatch, but not certain if they'll get a lot of draw as the more computer savvy folks have already found solutions for this... but I am probably not their target demographic anyway.
My thoughts anyway. Will probably play with the freebie version personally and at least poke around the service.
