Search the Community

My head hurts. Any feedback is appreciated. TL;DR: House shopping. Credit union claims they have pulled my credit report(s) and received rather bad scores. I can find no evidence of either the pull or a reason for the bad scores. Background: My lease is up at the end of January and the goal is to have bought and move into a house by then (it is sooooo much cheaper to buy in my area vs. renting.) I figured I had adequate credit--not great, but no significant bad guys like collections or anything. My credit cards have always had low limits but I never really cared. I never carry a balance and I have a year and a half of student loan payments made on time ($21kish principle.) A credit union recently denied me preapproval with the following blurb: "I reviewed the information on the application and as part of a prequalification , I pulled the credit report. Unfortunately, your credit scores do not meet our minimum requirement of 620. Your scores were Beacon 469, Fair Isaac 571 and Fico 656. We take the middle score for the minimum. At this time you file will be forwarded to our denial department. You will receive a copy of your scores in the mail. You may want to request a copy of your credit report from Equifax." I understood that to mean they used FICO plus two other credit scores with only my Equifax report as input, but another poster here (shifter) has said that Beacon and Fair Isaac are code for Experian and Equifax, so I dunno. I'm curious about this, but at this point it is secondary. Ex and Eq put me through hell re: verifying my identity, but I finally got both paper reports (Ex as my free annual, Eq on the basis of denial of credit.) My annual Transunion report is ~8 months old, so I am disregarding it (but it doesn't have anything worth mentioning.) * Experian lists no inquiries whatsoever. * Equifax lists only inquiries from "Equifax", :"ND-Equifax", and "AR-Equifax". Equifax and AR-Equifax both have pulls on 11/6, whereas I received the above email on 11/5. Conceivably, there could be some kind of international date line weirdness going on here? That seems to be a bit of a stretch, though. There's no other inquiry anywhere near the timeframe in question. * I've just now signed up for USAA CCMP. No inquiries listed whatsoever on all three reports. * Note that I opted out years ago. * Experian's FAKO gives me 709 for all three reports, which they say is a bit over 43rd percentile. For whatever that's worth. * The only derogatory thing I can see are two late CC payments, not consecutive, about two years ago. As stated previously, I've been paying my student loan on time for the past year and a half (before that, it was in deferral) and the reports show this. * The credit union claims to have sent me a letter confirming those scores. I may have tossed it aside (though not in the trash) without opening it, or it may never have come... I can't recall. I plan on tearing the place apart looking for it when I get home. * Re: identity mixups, I have a fairly unusual name. There is not a single other individual alive with my first, middle and last name--I think I would bet my life on it. I would not quite bet my life, but at least my life's savings, that no one else with my first and last name exists. * Up until a couple months ago, my credit reports had been frozen for several years. * Immediately after I unlocked my reports (before the mortgage application), Comcast did a credit check on me and there was some kind of problem that required I go down to the office. The person in online chat said their system uses Equifax but I couldn't get them to be more specific about the nature of the issue. The person at the office frowned a bit, fiddled around for 2 or 3 minutes, and then said "oh!" and did something on his computer and the issue was fixed. I was out the door before I could think to ask what the problem was. ***There is no Equifax inquiry matching this date.*** * I just got approved for Home Depot's sorry-we-really-suck-at-computers credit report freebie thing, but right now I don't see the point in seeing the same story laid out for a third (or rather, the 7th, 8th & 9th) time. * Equifax made no comment on my claiming denial of credit. I sent them a sharply worded letter because of the runaround they were giving me re: identity verification and they interpreted it as an address dispute and sent me a dispute resolution based on that. (Which is weird because I wasn't trying to remove an address--I was essentially trying to add one.) So I could have received a report for that reason, though I am also due a free annual report from them. I just wrote a polite but somewhat sharply worded email to the credit union, but I thought I would ask 'round here before I send it. It's easy to assume a cockup on their end but... this is just too weird. There were apparently/supposedly two people personally overseeing my credit check (I got exasperated earlier about an unrelated red tape issue and complained hard-yet-politely enough that they suddenly started treating me with kid gloves in a way that only potential mortgage customers are treated. And millionaires, one assumes.) How could this have possibly happened? And what about the Comcast thing? I feel like I am missing something and I am too strung out, overworked and sleep deprived (10 month old... still colicky) to figure out what it is.