Reasonable range between 2, 8 and 9

[Anonymous]

I have a FICO 2 score of 664, FICO 8 of 735 and FICO 9 of 831 (fair, good and excellent) - I have no late payments, long history and lots of unused credit, but one paid $200 medical collection. It is bizarre to me that my scores come back so different. Does this seem reasonable? What is driving these differences?

What is even more odd is that my wife shares the vast majority of accounts with me (and credit reports look almost identical line by line), but her FICO 2 score is 767. It just doesnt make sense to me - these scores dont seem to have any consistency and they are the basis for siginficant financial decisions...

[iv]

Starting with the easy one first: your FICO 9 is so much higher because FICO 9 ignores PAID collections, while the older models still factor them in as a major negative item.

Would need more report-level details to fully ID the 2/8 differences, but speaking generally, the FICO 98 (Experian Score 2) model is much older, and does consider many factors quite differently.  (It also has a lower true maximum, of 844, vs the true max of 850 for FICO 8/9.)

If you are willing to share more report details, we could probably identify easy ways to pull your Score 2 up, if that medical collection is the only negative.

[Anonymous]

^^^^^^^ Exactly this. One consideration that maybe the difference between 2/8 is, I think version 8 gives you a little credit when a collection is paid vs. unpaid. I don’t know that to be the case for version 2. Maybe iv knows?

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:
^^^^^^^ Exactly this. One consideration that maybe the difference between 2/8 is, I think version 8 gives you a little credit when a collection is paid vs. unpaid. I don’t know that to be the case for version 2. Maybe iv knows?

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FICO 8 doesn't do anything paid vs unpaid, the exclusion there is at $100 and it definitely counts there.

I'd like to see reason codes on FICO 2 personally or as iv suggests a fuller explanation of what's on the file, but what I have noticed is FICO 8 does have an age metric with negatives and possibly two based on some data I've seen on my personal file... and anything older than that seemingly doesn't.

If you have old dirt on EQ FICO 5 and presumably EX FICO 2, it'll haunt you for a while in terms of depressing one's score, and a collection is that.  I didn't have awesome access to EX FICO 2 when I had a tax lien / collection / 60D on that file, but I did get it north of 720 for my mortgage and even 730 at one point, so it is possible to score better there with a collection.

[Anonymous]

Looking closely, the only other difference between mine and my wife's report is that our $36K HELOC is in my name. We used it for home improvements and it is basically maxed out. Even with this my overall revolving debt is only at 8%, but does 2 treat that HELOC differently than 8? The simulator (neither MyFico or the one my lender has) doesn't show any impact of paying it down, but wonder if the simulator handles the HELOC properly. So my plan is to do some 0% balance transfers and bring the HELOC down to about 60% (and probably revolving credit up to 12-14%) - does this make sense?

[Anonymous]

Codes on mine:

EXPERIAN/FAIR, ISAAC (VER. 2)

SCORE: 664

40 - DEROGATORY PUBLIC RECORD OR COLLECTION FILED

20 - TIME SINCE DEROGATORY PUBLIC RECORD OR COLLECTION IS TOO SHORT

14 - LENGTH OF TIME ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED

33 - PROPORTION OF LOAN BALANCES TO LOAN AMOUNTS IS TOO HIGH

08 - TOO MANY INQUIRIES LAST 12 MONTHS

Codes on my wife:

SCORE: 767

EXPERIAN/FAIR, ISAAC (VER. 2)

10 - PROPORTION OF BALANCE TO HIGH CREDIT ON BANK REVOLVING OR ALL REVOLVING ACCOUNTS

09 - TOO MANY ACCOUNTS RECENTLY OPENED

13 - TIME SINCE DELINQUENCY IS TOO RECENT OR UNKNOWN

18 - NUMBER OF ACCOUNTS WITH DELINQUENCY

08 - TOO MANY INQUIRIES LAST 12 MONTHS

[Anonymous]

That’s right it’s version 9 that gives credit for a paid one. Thank you for correcting me, Rev.

[Anonymous]

This is a snapshot of my summary from MyFico - it is hard for me to reconcile this with the scores I have recieved:

http://clemson.box.com/shared/static/lidnra04nwx68tfupqq0y2r77e280emf.jpg

[Revelate]

HELOC utilization appears to count full monty for me on EX FICO 2.  I suspect it does for everyone; the HELOC exclusions are in FICO 8/9, and some of the FICO 04 models seem to exclude it (TU) but possibly not others since I had reason codes on EX FICO 3 complaining about it but in fairness I don't know of any lender that switched to EX FICO 3... or if they did they went to 8 ninja quick like.

Beyond that the collection does count, and your wife does have a very good EX FICO 2 score for having any sort of deliquency on it.

[iv]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Looking closely, the only other difference between mine and my wife's report is that our $36K HELOC is in my name. We used it for home improvements and it is basically maxed out. Even with this my overall revolving debt is only at 8%, but does 2 treat that HELOC differently than 8? The simulator (neither MyFico or the one my lender has) doesn't show any impact of paying it down, but wonder if the simulator handles the HELOC properly. So my plan is to do some 0% balance transfers and bring the HELOC down to about 60% (and probably revolving credit up to 12-14%) - does this make sense?

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I would not expect shuffling debt from the HELOC to cards to improve any FICO scoring model - at BEST, it might be neutral, and for most recent models, would probably be somewhat negative. (But if it makes sense financially, go for it...)

The medical collection (is it your wife's reports as well as yours?) is likely to be the single biggest factor impacting your pre-FICO 9 scores - get rid of that, and you'll see a major jump.  While I am not personally familiar with the process, I understand that many people have been successful in leveraging HIPAA to remove paid medical collections...

Beyond that, the fewer accounts reporting balances, the better (even $1 reporting counts).  But zero revolving accounts reporting balances is also "bad".  This does tend to have a bit more of an impact on some of the older models - what percentage of revolving accounts do you have reporting non-zero balances?