FICO Scores

Financing, Hard Money Lenders, Private Money
1

Any recommendations for websites that are relatively inexpensive for pulling my own fico scores?

Mark

2

Why don’t you just have a broker pull it for you?

3

Be careful if you pull your own. They are not the same ones that a broker/lender will get. The ones you pull are usually higher than what they actually are (I personally think it is fraudulent an the part of the credit agencies).

Just take anything you get on your own with a grain of salt.

  Brian
4

myFICO.com. Online credit checking resources are good to get an overview of your credit situation but won’t suffice for a pre-approval.

Brian, each lending entity has their own scoring system where different weight is applied to different aspects of a credit profile. The exact same person going in to get a car lease will have different credit scores pulled from the auto dealership than they would going into your office and you pulling a mortgage enhanced credit report.

myFICO.com using the scoring system that most mortgage reports use.

5

Here are links to 2 recent discussions on this subject

http://www.reiclub.com/forums/index.php?board=29;action=display;threadid=9110

http://www.reiclub.com/forums/index.php?board=26;action=display;threadid=9220

Hope these help

6

Also, here’s an online forum (similar to this one) that discusses credit scoring, credit repair tactics, etc.

http://debt-consolidation-credit-repair-service.com/phpBB2/index.php

7

Go to www.experian.com and there will be a link on the homepage for a free credit report that you are granted once a year. Hope that helps…

8

Thanks for the link Promise Land. The only thing bad about the “free” credit reports is that the scores are not correct. This situation was discussed previously. I posted the previous posts above.

4EEM makes a good point in having a broker pull it to let you know where you really stand. Do not do it until you are ready to proceed though. You do not need to have any unnecessary pulls on your credit.

9

Beware of the PLUS score. Some places will try to pass this off as a credit score.

Freecreditreport.com gives a PLUS from all 3 bureaus, but is surprisingly accurate (as least in my case).

Myfico.com gives you your actual FICO score. The aggregate was only 1 total point difference from my PLUS, but when they translated it into FICO, the total difference was 3 points (lower).

So, while the other site gave a fair estimate, myfico is definitely the way to go if you want to see what the lenders see.

I’m one of those people who needs as much information as I can get and it’s really helped me over the past year. I’m hoping my score will be 700 by January.