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Originally Posted by callipygian
It's possible that different institutions look at different things.
They tend to look at the same bottom line number because it's efficient. The whole FICO thing is the attempt to measure credit worthiness, which aims to answer the question, "If I loan them money, will they pay it back?"
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If I am loaning out $10,000, like for a car, I'm less concerned with their raw ability to pay and more concerned with their willingness to pay. If I am loaning out $500,000 for a primary residence, I am going to scrutinize their ability to pay way more than their willingness to pay.
I think very few people simply say, "I can pay this, but I'm not going do it." The thing that is more often seen when someone isn't paying is "I can't pay all my obligations, so which one am I going to skip?"
So I'm extremely doubtful that "willingness to pay" is actually a meaningful factor in the sense that it varies significantly from person to person. I could be wrong, but nothing I've ever read would indicate that.
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Not that these sorts of things always follow logic, but I'm saying that I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't boil down to a single number.
You might be surprised, then. It may not "completely" boil down to a single number, but credit scores are important because they're more consistent, more reliable, and much cheaper than human analysis. And there are different types of FICO scores that are geared towards modeling different types of loans. You would have to be right on the border before someone would manually look at it.
https://www.myfico.com/credit-educat...core-versions/