@Anonymous wrote:marty56, I only understood half of what you wrote. What is CFL? Why would it be flagged? Why would it hurt the score (in the longterm) and why would you need to pay all the interest even if paid early?
And YES, I get it, FAKO are not reliable. However, for me, both Creditkarma and CreditCheckTotal have been fairly close, in the past.
CFL = Consumer Finance Account (Consumer Finance Loan). These are installment loans provided by lenders who target subprime borrowers. Sometimes the lender actually has "Finance" in their name. Common loans are furniture stores and payday type loans but even some bigger loan companies provide these. These can ding your score 10 points even if you always pay on time -- and there are data points out there that they may continue to ding your score for 10 years AFTER you pay them (but not always).
CFA type loans typically don't let you reduce interest by paying early. It depends on your state's laws and how the loan is chartered. Some CFA lenders don't loan through a bank but through a Native American reservation and abide the laws of the reservation instead of state or federal laws.
Credit Karma scores may sometimes be equal to Credit Check Total, but not always. Here is my 2017 graph of Credit Karma versus CCT:
Since FICO is the score 99.9% of lenders use, you can see there are cases where my FICO score was way lower than my CK score (means if I applied, I'd get denied) and in other situations it was higher than CK (which means I might have been approved but CK scared me against applying).
Personal unsecured loans are not good for anyone with a FICO score lower than 720 in my opinion -- this is because the risks of getting a subprime loan far outweight the benefits. If you want to buy a car, get an auto loan. If your lender says it's too much of a hassle, change lenders. If you're afraid of getting an auto loan, buy a car you can afford to pay cash for. Car loans even for prime borrowers tend to cost more over 5 years than you would believe. In most cases, a person financing a $30,000 car with excellent credit may still pay thousands in interest. So if you have subprime credit, auto loans will really crush your payment amount over the period of the loan.
In your case, your FICO scores are probably decent (but you didn't post them yet) so I bet in 12-24 months of playing the credit game well, you'll qualify for a great loan rate -- even an unsecured loan if you still want it.
Regarding VantageScore vs FICO, I think this graph from Thomas is quite accurate:
@Thomas_Thumb wrote:Below is a re-post of a table and graphs comparing score distributions of various Fico scoring models (along with Vantagescore). The data makes more sense here than in the bankcard thread.
EX Percentile Classic 08 Classic 04 Classic 98 Bankcard 08 Bankcard 04 Bankcard 98 NexGen II VS 3.0 EX NE 10 532 554 551 528 556 552 521 521 609 20 589 606 599 586 605 594 584 551 636 30 640 651 645 634 647 638 636 589 657 40 683 687 684 678 685 681 681 644 681 50 716 718 721 714 722 723 726 671 713 60 744 751 756 747 761 761 773 698 750 70 773 780 783 783 797 793 818 741 779 80 797 799 802 812 823 820 853 781 802 90 818 816 819 837 844 841 883 809 823
Another data point: my VS from CreditKarma was a good 37 points lower than what my true FICO8 TU score was.
I would completely ignore the scores CreditKarma gives out and just use it as a free credit report monitoring service for EQ and TU.
