You have been told over and over again to order a copy of your credit report so that you can spot inaccurate information and prevent identity theft. When ordering your report you decided to order your credit scores aswell. You review your report and your scores are above 700?s and everything looks good. Now you decide to apply for a mortgage and you have a lender pull your credit and your scores are lower than the scores on the credit report you ordered. You ask yourself what happened? Nothing happened.

Every industry has its own scoring models or scoring method. If you are applying for a car, a credit card, a mortgage, or even insurance they all use different scoring models and you will have different scores based on different parameters. The credit scores you receive when requesting your own credit report will be higher and will not be used by any of the industries.

There are some scores that are not even true FICO scores. You can request your FICO scores through www.myfico.com but again you will receive personal FICO scores that are not industry driven.

What about www.annualcreditreport.com? This takes you to each individual bureaus website to obtain your credit. Those are FICO scores - right? Not necessarily.When you pull credit though Experian and order your scores you receive a PlusScore which is a score based on an in-house model developed by Experian not by FICO. The same is true for TransUnion; you are receiving an in-house model called a TransRisk score. If you want a FICO score from Trans Union you have to order it through their sister site which is www.transunioncs.com. Equifax does provide a FICO score; however, they are still personal scores. The only way to obtain your mortgage scores is when you apply for a mortgage loan through a lender, bank, credit union, etc. They are set up with special codes that are used to pull your credit through the mortgage scoring models.

We have all seen the commercials for www.freecreditreport.com. This is an Experian based website and the scores you receive are not FICO and there is a cost. There are other advertisements that also provide this type of service and all come at a cost.

Bankcard scores are true FICO scores but are revolving scores which will be different from mortgage scores and are usually 30 days old by the time the card holder receives them. Scores can change daily so they may not be accurate. With so many scores why bother to look at them if they're all different? Each score model has factors that carry different weight depending on what they support. For example, when you apply for a credit card the focus will be on your credit card history and when applying for a mortgage the focus will lean towards previous or existing mortgage history.

Vantage Score is the score that you may receive through credit monitoring services. These scores are developed by Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion and the scores range from 501-990. These are not accepted by the Lenders when applying for a mortgage loan.

The most important scores are your FICO scores and these are the one's that will be used when applying for your mortgage loan.