I just tried to open a savings account online and they quoted a credit score for me that’s almost 75 points lower than what creditkarma.com says my credit score is. Why might this be happening?
CreditKarma uses the credit score from TransUnion. If the bank is using one of the other two credit agencies, you’ll have a different rating with them.
it might be worth looking at annualcreditreport.com (which is the government mandated site) to see if one of the agencies has a negative that the others don’t.
Different credit bureaus can calculate a person’s credit reputation differently. You could ask for a copy of what the bank used, in case you need to dispute any information it. I know nothing about the website you mention.
Provided there are no adverse items in one agency score versus another, it’s worth noting that banks don’t always use off-the-shelf VantageScores or FICO scores. A lot use their own proprietary tweaked versions. There are so many credit scoring models that any individual one is only a guide at best, though with that said, 75 points is quite a lot.
I went through this a few months back.
I got copies of all three reports and Transunion had 3 errors which affected my score, as well as having me using a name which isn’t mine, 3 addresses where I have never lived, and working for two companies I have never heard of.
Even after fixing all that my score is still 40 points lower than the other two.
I was talking to a man at the bank the other day and he said there were 110 points difference in his scores, and even after he fixed the errors on one of them it still took them months to change the score.
I guess that is why the advice is always to pull all three reports and check them for errors. You’d think they’d all be similar but they’re not.
Thanks for the advice. I think I pulled my experian within the last 12 months, but the other 2 should be ready to go. I made a lot of positive changes after filing bk a few years back, so it’s possible that an old delinquency is still being reported or something like that.
If you want to at least cover 2 out of the 3 credit bureaus, sign up for Credit Sesame too. It’s basically the same thing as Credit Karma but uses Experian.
Now if I could only find one for Equifax.