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If anyone is getting a mortgage or refinancing soon, ask your lender to 'drop' equifax without running your score with them - just take the score from the other
by cwkoss 7y ago
If anyone is getting a mortgage or refinancing soon, ask your lender to 'drop' equifax without running your score with them - just take the score from the other two. Equifax is an unnecessary security and privacy risk.
They are a horrible company that needs to go out of business. Make their customers feel embarrassed to be doing business with them.
- noodlesUK 7y agoDoes this actually work? Do bank employees have any control of the credit check process?
- cwkoss 7y agoMy lender always drops the lowest of the three scores, so I was able to just say "I'm going to keep looking at other lenders if you contact Equifax on my behalf. Can you agree to not use Equifax on this deal if I agree move forward today?" and it wasn't a problem. Some of the larger lenders may not have this flexibility.
- pentae 7y agoSounds pretty suspicious. Like you have a really bad credit score on Equifax compared to the other two
- jacobush 7y agoI guess Equifax has a low enough rep that it is less suspicious than for any other
- bogle 7y agoIn which case the Equifax score would have been dropped anyway. So the lender isn't in any worse position.
- rolltiide 7y agolol “suspicious”, as if it matters you realize you can say the wildest most unsophisticated things and they’ll just punch the numbers into a machine and get a “lend to this guy or not” result either way right?
- Joakal 7y agoWasn't a problem? What do you think is more likely: 1) They didn't follow company procedure of which big banks insist employees follow otherwise the employees risk 'liability for not picking the 3 credit agencies'. Or 2) They lied and followed company procedure, and not tell you the outcome from them. 3) Your lender probably passed the request and got 1) or 2) later in the chain.
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoYou're missing the most important outcome: 4) They insist they have to use Equifax, lose the deal, and note why in their records.
- y4mi 7y ago> and it wasn't a problem. That outcome is academic, as the parent specifically said it wasn't an issue.
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoYou mean, they insist you have to use Equifax, lose the deal, then then wonder what’s for lunch in the cafeteria today. Or most likely of all, every lender insists you have to use Equifax, and the people you interact with have no authority to even run your request up a management chain, let alone actually honor it.
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoreasons for losing sales get put in a database, and people pay attention when the same reason shows up repeatedly.
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoIn my experience, nobody cares. I remember how long it took before Netflix finally supported a player on Linux desktop. And in the end, their decision had zero to do with customer demand or complaints for that feature. You can log reasons for bad business outcomes all day long, millions and millions, and it won’t change corporate behavior.
- paulcole 7y agoWhat was your procedure for confirming they did anything but roll their eyes and go about their normal routine?
- cwkoss 7y agoI kept Equifax frozen through the refinance
- drcode 7y agoYeah, instead of getting my lender to give me a better interest rate or a discount on fees, I'm going to instead use my negotiating leverage to make sure Equifax makes $20 less revenue.
- delinka 7y agoMight as well not even vote. Your one votes can't turn the tide.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoDepending on where you live that can be very true.
- rdtwo 7y agoThe next election is going to be decided by about 5% of the country that’s contested. Everyone else might as well not even bother filling in the box for president
- sp332 7y agoThere are more votes than just the presidential election.
- rdtwo 7y agoYeah that’s why I just said presidential a lot of other important elections that count on the downballot
- vijayr02 7y agoAsimov's story takes this to its (extreme) logical conclusion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)
- maxerickson 7y agoThat's not what they said though, they said they are gonna vote for whoever makes their life directly better in the relative short term.
- gjs278 7y agothey don’t and this doesn’t. it just makes you sound like a weirdo.
- dheera 7y agoI tried this when signing up for a Chase credit card and they said that it was their policy to use Equifax. (I had a credit freeze in place with Equifax at the time.)
- cwkoss 7y agoYou have to be willing to walk away if they say no, works best if the company cares about losing the deal - credit card signups might not be lucrative enough for a human to get involved and care.
- notyourday 7y agoPrimary lenders ( the ones that actually lend their own money and at the end have the best rates -- arrived at adding the total expected cost of the APR plus add junk fees ) do not use non-automated underwriting for conforming loans. They win over the lenders that do not use automatic underwriting by tens of thousands of dollars.
- pas 7y agoCould someone explain what non-automated underwriting means? And what does confirming mean in this sense? I get that they win compared to those who use more labor, but still some details would be nice :)
- belenos46 7y agoAutomated underwriting is a computer program that takes your vital statistics as input (age, income, probably some illegal things like race and physical location of the house you're trying to buy [in RE lending, this is called "red-lining" and is illegal.]) and outputs a yes-or-no answer, sometimes with hints about what need to be changed to get a yes. Manual underwriting is the same thing, only it's a person doing the same thing, and you can talk a person around. Why might you need to do that? Well, I bought a rental building after I bought my primary residence, and I intended to move into the top unit in the building. Automated underwriting failed that because "primary home with more bedrooms and bathrooms" is "better" than "apartment in rental building" according to automated underwriting. Since my lender also had manual underwriting, I was able to explain my situation to them, and why an apartment was preferable (I still don't understand why "I'll live there for a year to keep an eye on my investment" wasn't enough reason. They openly acknowledged that it was the superior way to do it, but it didn't move the needle on the formula)
- rolltiide 7y agoI get benefits from my Equifax score and have made zero changes to my credit behavior, am aware of items on my credit report and am just as vulnerable to identity theft as all of you. Its an objective acceptance of reality. Typically I like to know which lenders check which score, so that I can strategically drop a hard inquiry on a particular reporting agency’s score, I use the multiple scores as a currency for maximum amounts of hard inquiries, as a hard inquiry temporarily lowers the score decreasing chances of approval or favorable lending terms. Once I hit two or three on Equifax, I will only apply with lenders that hit Transunion scores, etc. When the approvals go through my unutilized credit has increased so much that it has raised my scores more than the inquiries dropped them. When I actually go to apply for a mortgage I would be considered the most credit worthy borrower and save hundreds of thousands in interest payments. I really don’t care about this crusade.
- wil421 7y agoMy lender wanted Equifax and Transunion only. I had no choice but to unfreeze it.
- cwkoss 7y agoThat's when you give them a 5 minute rant about how Equifax is bad for society and they should feel bad for supporting their business, then look for another lender.
- mcny 7y agoAt the very least, government sponsored entities should not give them money. I have tried to ask both Queens Borough Public Library and Research Foundation City University of New York (RF CUNY) but nobody I talk to has any authority on this matter.
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y agoDo we really know for sure that the other bureau's are really any better, and not just lucky at this point?
- dalbasal 7y agoIt doesn't necessarily matter. If one of these companies is badly wounded by credibility problems... it can catalyze a wider change.
- nwah1 7y agoAlternatively, it could just consolidate the industry even more than it already is.
- beepboopbeep 7y agoI swear this is the motto of hacker news. "Everything sucks and you're wasting your time trying to change it" - HN
- criley2 7y agoNot just hacker news, it's pervasive in any community where people who value intelligence meet. It's because cynicism is a lazy shortcut to a 'smart opinion'. How do we sound smart with zero effort? Well we don't want to be gullible (everything is good and fair!) so we do the opposite (everything is corrupt and bad!). I really wish it were more than that.
- benj111 7y agoSo what you're saying is, everyone says something is black (or white to appear smart), so therefore to appear actually smart, I should say everything is a shade of grey?
- AtHeartEngineer 7y agoEverything is a shade of grey Seriously though, most of the time it actually is, and it's almost always more complex than we realize. Saying something like "Amazon is good" well, that's an opinion, definitely grey. Saying "This is exactly 1 inch", well, it probably isn't and the more you care about it's accuracy, the harder it is to measure. Most things are like that. Clear cut at first, and increasingly more difficult the more precise you go. The devil is in the details. So, yes, if the only options are black and white, the answers are generally easy, you've got a 50% chance of being wrong. As soon as you blur the line, you're basically wrong all the time. The goal is to be less wrong, and to improve, make progress.
- PretzelFisch 7y agoYou assume they still don't get paid when a credit report is run without asking for that burro. I don't see any evidence that this is how the fee structure works.
- pimmen 7y agoIf not a lot of people are run through Equifax, their customers are going to ask themselves why they’re paying them. That could at the very least give the customers leverage to negotiate the rates down, which would also hurt Equifax’s revenue stream.
- cactus2093 7y agoPost-breach, both TransUnion and Equifax now work with CreditKarma to let you view your score and whether or not your report is locked, and they both let you create an online account with them as well to view your score or easily lock/unlock your credit report whenever you need to. Experian refuses to work with CreditKarma and only lets you "freeze" and unfreeze your account in the legally required way, which requires filling out a big form and resubmitting your Name, address and SSN every time you do it. To create a similar online account with them to manage lock/unlock status and view your score they charge an absurd fee of $20/month. The problem with boycotting Equifax is I also want to boycott Experian. And in the future, maybe TransUnion will have a major issue, who knows. Is the bank going to be cool with me boycotting the 2 biggest of them, or even all 3? Obviously not, so let's not pretend that consumer choice is a real way out of this mess.
- TheHypnotist 7y agoTransunion, in my opinion, does it right. It's not a huge burden to get approved for anything because I have all my reports locked. However, transunion makes it very simple to lock/unlock.
- cwkoss 7y agoThis is why consumers need to organize to kill the worst one first. Equifax has a poor reputation from the leak in addition to having an antisocial business model, so they are the most vulnerable.
- mannanj 7y agoMight not be a bad time for disruption by a blockchain https://bloom.co/ https://bloom.co/