Strange as it may seem, the score should not be there. This is the biggest disappointment about every credit report, no matter how accurate it is there is no indication of the actual credit score (the FICO score) in it. The report you get reflects your credit activities, it does not give you the magic three digits. If you want to know what your credit activities total to, you have to pay and then the bureaus will provide you with the score. The bureaus (www.equifax.com, www.experian.com, www.transunion.com) also run temporary offers to get the score for free, but you have to be careful and read all the conditions and terms scrupulously, otherwise you may end up charged for some membership you don’t want. There is one other web-site www.myfico.com that provides the real FICO scores, and that’s it. No other web-site is authorized to tell you your credit score. If somebody claims they are, it may well be that you are being scammed. Nobody can buy a whatever score one wishes for from anyone.
As there are three different bureaus, there will be three FICO scores that may differ a bit for the same reason as the reports differ. The scores are derived totally from the information in the reports.
It is a recent change: the authorized user information is not taken into account by the three credit score bureaus any more, so no authorized user can build any score this way. Fair Isaac Corporation’s newest FICO scoring model ignores authorized user accounts when calculating Classic FICO credit risk scores. As it is stated on the Company’s website, this action is intended to protect lenders and FICO scores from abuse of authorized user credit card accounts by a new kind of credit repair service that sells consumer credit card histories to credit applicants in order to purposefully misrepresent the applicants’ own credit history to lenders and other businesses.
It is a snowball effect. For example, you skip a payment in May. Delinquency. Then you pay your regular monthly amount in June. However, the system of amortizing a mortgage works in such a way that your June amount is used to pay off the May debt, but then there is no money left for actually the June period payment itself. Delinquency - 2. If the next month you don’t pay 2 monthly amounts, it results in delinquency - 3, etc. Many borrowers are unaware of this effect and do not even know about the trouble until they see the delinquencies in the report. The only way to go from there is to get current with the mortgage payments and wait. Delinquency stays on the record for 7 years, but its negative power declines with time.
