What's Your FICO Score Really Worth?
In today's market, personal credit scores are being skewed by a decline in average FICO ® scores. Why should you care? Well, if you are intending to get into debt responsibly in the coming year your FICO score is still the number one criteria your lender will use to determine your likelihood of paying them back. It's also one of the chief pricing factors to getting the best interest rate. That said, things are changing at a rapid pace. The newly minted FICO models are supposedly taking less consideration for small things like parking tickets but the really big defaults for big items like mortgages and car loans will weigh even more heavily as a result. All defaults have less effect on your score as time goes on . With improved history that is! So it stands to reason that if more homeowners take the 'walkaway' option the impact will be figured into the score models for that particular historical period of consumer behavior. Essentially scoring models are averages o