Interesting Car-Buying Side Note: Our Credit Score

Ever since tak­ing on the task of becom­ing a lit­tle more finan­cially savvy — start­ing this blog was part of that effort as well as doing a whole lot of read­ing and research — I’ve been curi­ous about our credit score.  Sure, I’ve done the three free annual credit reports and they always come out very clean.

As curi­ous as I was, I’ve always been way too cheap to pay good money to learn that mys­te­ri­ous and mag­i­cal credit score number.

Instead, I’ve tried dream­ing up ways of find­ing access to the score with­out pay­ing.  Yes­ter­day, bored to tears while wait­ing in the auto deal­er­ship (good night! buy­ing a car sure is a long and mind-numbingly bor­ing expe­ri­ence), it sud­denly occurred to me that this was just the moment I’d been wait­ing for.

After going through the first round of paper­work with the fleet sales guy (aka Dan the Sub­aru man) — you know, where you have to fill out all the details of where you’ve lived and where you’ve worked for the past five years (same house now for six years; same employ­ment for 13 years; The Husband’s been with the same com­pany for 31 years) plus you have to list your income, your mort­gage pay­ment, and any other debts (ours was a short list as our only debt is the remain­ing 6 months on our Sub­aru Impreza loan) — any­way, after that round of paper­work, Dan the Sub­aru man handed us off to the finance guy.

So now I’m bored to tears in a dif­fer­ent office and sud­denly I think to ask about our credit score.  If any­one has access to it, this guy will, right?

Of course both Dan and the finance guy have both men­tioned the fact that we have excel­lent credit.  We know that already.  But can he tell me my score?

Sure.  But he quickly goes on to explain that they use a slightly dif­fer­ent score; it’s a credit score spe­cific to car deal­ers and though very close to the FICO score every­one knows about, it’s not exactly the same.  I wasn’t lis­ten­ing really hard, I just wanted to know the num­ber.  Then the finance guy goes on about how it’s not just a high score, it’s an excel­lent score.  It’s one of the high­est he’s ever seen.  He pro­ceeds to tell us how he’s been work­ing to get his own score up — his appar­ently is good but not excel­lent — and then he pulls up our credit record and goes on about how much credit we have, how low a per­cent­age of that avail­able credit is in use, how we don’t have a lot of closed accounts, etc.  At this point I’m ready to slap the finance guy because not only am I bored to dis­trac­tion but he’s not giv­ing me the one piece of info that inter­ests me.

Finally he switches to another screen and show me that my score is actu­ally a lit­tle lower than The Husband’s.  Mine is 822.  The Husband’s is 860.

The num­bers didn’t mean much to me right then and there because I only have room in my head for a lim­ited num­ber of num­bers and the FICO credit score scale isn’t one of them.  But I did a Google search today.  Since I didn’t pay atten­tion to the name of the scale the finance guy said he was using, I couldn’t find any spe­cific info about what it is and how, exactly, it dif­fers from the FICO score.  But I did learn that The Husband’s score is above the top FICO num­ber (850 appears to the the top FICO score available).

The par­tic­u­lars don’t really mat­ter to me.  I’ve always known that we have excel­lent credit (mine was good on it’s own merit but being mar­ried to The Hus­band cer­tainly didn’t hurt) and I assumed that our credit score would be fairly high.  Now I know it is.

What I want to know now is, if we have such excel­lent credit, why did the process of buy­ing the car take so gosh darned long?!

Related posts:

1. Just Had to Share This Purchase
2. Day 214: New Driver’s Insurance
3. Count­ing My Bless­ings: #7
4. Day 106: Car stuff, Church stuff, Christ­mas stuff and a big Stu­pid Tax