Wright State finance professor Carol Wang an expert for Wallet Hub story on credit scores

Excerpt

The Myth: Many people assume we each have three, and only three, credit scores, one from each major credit bureau: TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. After all, anyone with a Social Security number who’s ever possessed either a credit card or a loan also has a credit report from each of these bureaus. So it would seem only logical for there to be three corresponding credit scores. But that, as it turns out, isn’t true.

The Fact: Having three major credit reports does not mean that we have just three credit scores. Rather, it means there are three versions of each type of credit score that we have.

Take the VantageScore 3.0 credit-score model for example. We each have one of these scores based on our TransUnion credit report, another based on our Experian credit report and a third based on our Equifax credit report. The same is true of the most popular version of the FICO score, FICO Score 8, as well as older iterations of this base score and FICO’s various industry-specific scores. There are three versions of each, though only two are available to consumers because of a spat between Experian and the Fair Isaac Corporation, the creator and namesake of the FICO score.

Read the entire post at wallethub.com