What's Your Credit Score?

[Russell Brazil]

A huge misconception people have is that they have 1 credit score, or that they even have 3 credit scores.  The credit scores that lenders use are from the Fair Isaac Corporation, FICO.  Any scores attained from other sources such as Credit Karma, are not of any use, as lenders do not use them.  But FICO has many different algorithms, that are optimized to lending in different industries.  Each score will be calculated from each of the 3 different credit bureaus. As we can see from my screen shot here, Im able to obtain 25 separate credit scores from FICO, and they still have more algorithms that they do not make publicly available. 

And within these I have a low of 770 FICO score version 4 on Transunion to a high of 838 on FICO score version 8 on Transunion.  

Mortgage lenders will typically use your middle score of one of the mortgage enhanced scores. 

[Steve Vaughan]

Originally posted by @Russell Brazil:

A huge misconception people have is that they have 1 credit score, or that they even have 3 credit scores.  The credit scores that lenders use are from the Fair Isaac Corporation, FICO.  Any scores attained from other sources such as Credit Karma, are not of any use, as lenders do not use them.  But FICO has many different algorithms, that are optimized to lending in different industries.  Each score will be calculated from each of the 3 different credit bureaus. As we can see from my screen shot here, Im able to obtain 25 separate credit scores from FICO, and they still have more algorithms that they do not make publicly available. 

And within these I have a low of 770 FICO score version 4 on Transunion to a high of 838 on FICO score version 8 on Transunion.  

Mortgage lenders will typically use your middle score of one of the mortgage enhanced scores. 

 Good info, Russell. 

I didn't know about the new versions.   Wonder what will happen to those of us with no or minimal interaction with auto and credit card borrowing.

I was amazed mine wasn't low when we refinanced a rental in 2017. It still started with an 8 but we've been letting 24 month no activity credit cards close had 0 consumer credit for at least 4 years.