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vadym909

If its only the score you want, cant you get that from creditkarma for free?

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Yes. They also have your credit history.

And, critically, a decent modern website/app and good enough customer support.

You can get a "FAKO" score from CreditKarma.

FYI, "FAKO" is VantageScore 3.0. It's colloquially called FAKO because 90% of lenders use some variation of FICO instead.

Regardless if it's FAKO or FICO score that you are looking at, they are calculated on the same credit history in your credit report (as far as I know). So, even if the scores are calculated in different ways it's reasonable to expect a high VantageScore 3.0 score will also show as a high FICO score too, even if the numbers aren't exact.

Does anyone know the specific differences in how these two scores are calculated?

I believe the FICO algorithm is not public, so there would be no way for us to know exactly how they calculate our scores.

We only know the factors that go in to the algorithm, and the score that comes out. Basically, a black box.

I've read in another thread here on HN that we also don't know the factors that go in. Someone listed off things like company title, marital status, # kids, car make/model kind of stuff. No idea if they were full of BS, but there's no requirement that the score is based solely on items in your credit report. We can probably (hopefully?) be sure that no race or race-correlated factors are included. (And same for other protected classes.)

I remember at uni teacher asking why people with larger shoes are more likely to default?

Answer was: Men tend to have larger feet.

I guess even if you ignore race, sex and other factors, data will seep in eventually anyways.

FICO is an acronym for Fair, Isaac, and Company. Their "FICO Score" is a piece of software that they make and sell. I'm sure the details are a little more complicated than I'm making it sound, but it's essentially software which is sold. Just like any software, there are different versions - and it's possible to get stuck on an old version if you don't pay for updates. There's FICO 98 (from 1998), FICO 04 (2004), FICO 8 (2008) and FICO 9 (2014). [1][2].

The FICO Software is a scoring engine which will produce an output based on the input you provide it. The three big credit bureaus collect data about you and feed it into the FICO Score software. Even if they all have the same version of the FICO software, because each bureau might have slightly different data on you, your score may be different from each one. Presumably, the FAKO companies also have the FICO Score software, but a much more limited set of data to feed into it - thus making the score less reliable to someone looking to issue you a loan (Big Bank).

At least, that is my understanding of how it works - admittedly, I may be mistaken and welcome corrections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_Sta... [2] http://www.fico.com/en/02-02-2015-fico-makes-additional-fico...

You can also get it for free from (at least) American Express and Discover if you have a credit card from them. I'm sure there are other card issuers that give it to you for free as well.

Correct. Chase offers it as well.

And Mint (owned by quicken) so you don't even need to open a new account or ding your credit. They do, however, serve you ads based on your data -- mostly credit card offers.

Citibank card holder here - getting free FICO via my online account.

Does creditkarma sell your credit information to people when you sign up with them?

How else would they make enough money to exist?

Bank of America now offers it for free too...

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