I know a guy who’s a multimillionaire. He came up from nothing and always had the mindset that if you have to finance it, you can’t afford it. A few years ago, he wanted to purchase an apartment complex, but was short by something like $500,000. He tried to get a loan, but the bank wouldn’t give him one because he had no credit. Instead, he sold two of his supercars to cover the difference and bought the complex.
That’s a lie. Someone who has millions in dollars in assets the bank would just ask for some form of collateral. They wouldn’t rely on a fucking fico score. Also it would be a company owning everything, not a person. You’ve literally made all this up in the most stupid way possible.
I refuse to participate in this and I have no idea what my credit score is.
I bought my land and house through owner finance, my debt was to a single individual. No banks involved, no credit check. Obviously this isn’t always an option, but it still is an option in some cases, and it’s a damn valuable option when it does present itself.
I buy used cars only, either through owner finance or paid in full. No banks.
I bought my land and house through owner finance, my debt was to a single individual.
That’s cool and all, but it isn’t practical if the person selling you the house also has a mortgage they need to pay off before moving. Shy of paying in cash, there’s not a home in my city of Houston I could have managed that with.
I buy used cars only, either through owner finance or paid in full. No banks.
I mean, that’s totally cool. But, again, it requires you to have a significant amount of cash on-hand and someone willing to sell a decent vehicle at a reasonable price. Possible, but certainly not trivial. And with the sheer number of dealerships and resellers and outright scammers in the business, its a minefield.
I have never had a loan from a bank.
Its certainly nice to have enough cash on hand to manage this trick. But good luck going to college without a parent’s savings. Even city colleges charge you far more than a part-time high school diploma job brings in.
I did know a couple of people who were born into relative poverty and managed to be totally unbanked while having a relatively easy time of it. But they were both sex workers. Not a career for the faint of heart.
I mean, again, obviously it’s not an option all the time. Just use common sense
As for the other points, I don’t think this comment really required someone to come through and cite it and break it down like I was some sort of Jordan Peterson esque life advice coach. I was giving my personal experience on not using the credit system, simply explaining how I personally have avoided the subject, and making the claim that there are other avenues. It’s not an essay, my dude. I’m not trying to sell anything to you. Again, just use common sense.
I just proved its possible, not that it’s feasible for YOU. Again, not trying to sell you anything
I don’t think the issue is an absence of sense. What we’ve got is a massive asset bubble that benefits the financial sector. Very often, there simply isn’t a good choice to make. You’re either living in a slum at inflated costs or you’re stuck living way out in the exurbs (where you’ll be burning through your expensive car) or even potentially homeless.
You can be up to your eyeballs in debt despite making the “savvy” move at every turn.
Credit score system is designed for the people with money to allow you to borrow that money. It’s based on a curve system so… If your at the bottom of the list is because 99% of the population is better than you at learning how to play the score system. Tldr: the score system was not designed with me in mind.
I don’t know if it works differently in the US but the best way to build your credit score is to not take on debt.
Keeping your credit utilization low and not missing any payments is the key. It’s an indication of how likely you are to meet the payments.
If you max your credit cards out and just pay the minimum amount, carrying thousands of dollars of debt and as a result can’t get a mortgage or a car loan because your credit score is shit then the system is working as expected.
Yeah I want to emphasize this too. It doesn’t “require you to take debt”, it checks to see if you pay your debts on time. If you carry a $5 credit card bill and pay it next month that has a positive effect. If you don’t pay that it doesn’t matter how much it is, you missed a payment, that’s a negative. You don’t have to have a bunch of loans to have a good credit score, you have to pay your bills.
Thats why having a credit card can be good for your credit score because you are effectively borrowing money until the end of the month, then paying it back. That signals on your credit score “hey this person borrows $1000 a month, and pays it back every time. They’re a reliable borrower”
I don’t know if it works differently in the US but the best way to build your credit score is to not take on debt.
The best way to build a score is to take out small amounts of debt and repay them in a timely fashion. But you’re still better off with a car note than without. You’re still better off with a credit card than without. You want an optimal number of data points for the system to track. And you want a history clear of missed payments.
Without that data history, it becomes very difficult to secure apartment space or access anything other than student credit. And, because you absolutely need a car and an apartment if you want to exist in America in anything close to comfort, that means you functionally need a credit score.
It really is crazy to look at someone’s financial history to figure out how much money to lend them and at what rate…and whether they have any income to pay it back, fucking fascists!!!
At some level, its just another aspect of the surveillance state.
“Oh, you want to buy a car? Show me your credit card statements. Show me every place you’ve ever lived. Tell me the name of your spouse, so I can interrogate that person as well.”
I might not even call it fascist, per say. Its more feudal. Some aristocrat demanding your life story before he lets you onto his fields to work a plow.
And all because these necessities of life are so expensive that nobody can just pay cash in hand for them anymore.
Your credit score actually goes down when you pay off and close accounts. Which would indicate you’re very financially responsible and will pay your debts off.
The reason is because a credit score is not about whether you will pay your debts and are financially responsible. It’s actually configured to be a score of how much money a lender can make from you. If they can’t profit from you, they don’t want to lend to you. So the score goes down.
If it was a score of financially reliable and stable you are, then it would be much more welcomed.
When Equifax had a major leak exposing personal information of millions of Americans I sent them a notice to permanently remove my data from use. To be clear, my Equifax score IS NOT frozen, it doesn’t exist altogether.
I’m still fucking pissed about that. All of their equipment should have been confiscated, securely erased, and melted down. Then we should have sent them a bill for disposing of that data securely, and a massive (like billion dollar) fine for fucking up that badly.
I was always taught not to get credit cards or loans. My mom, a teacher, always saves up her money and then pays for her cars and houses in full. Not once did I need any kind of credit score or anything. I have cars, a home, cell phones… internet, etc… and no credit for scammers to ruin lol!
usually I love to shit on muricans, But Germany has something similar. A private company called “Schufa”. This private company secretly calculates your credit score (no one knows realy how they calculate it) which determines if you get an apartment (for rent) or not. Living in the wrong street already kills your credit score here.
If the Schufa doesnt have information about you, it counts as negative.
As someone, who loves dunking on the Schufa, as any good German should. The Schufa-Score isn’t nearly as insane as some American credit score systems. Having an registered checkingsaccount & no outstanding bills or debt payments is enough data to have a high score.
You don’t need to repay debt to show, that you are able to.
Credit scores are the West’s social credit system.
If we value our freedom from a controlling, oppressive system, then we should penalize the creation, selling, buying and usage of credit score data. And we should keep on top of it to include any emerging attempts to re-establish an equivalent system.
You don’t actually need a good credit score to get a loan. The only reason FICO scores exist is to reduce the amount of work banks have to do to investigate potential customers. However, many smaller banks are willing to do a manual underwriting, where they look at your history and make a decision based on that instead.
Obviously if your credit score is low that is indicative of poor borrowing habits which will probably be corroborated by manual underwriting. However, if you have no credit history at all, you will probably get a better outcome than if the bank only looked at the FICO score.
Look for community banks, which are very small banks that serve your local community. Those banks are far more willing to give customized service like manual underwriting.
Better credit scores will definitely net you a lower interest rate, though. Zero credit history is a major liability for lenders, so even small banks or credit unions with private investors will want some kind of benefit or incentive for taking on an increased risk of default.
The real fucked up part about credit scores is that it seems like it should be something the federal government regulates, but they don’t. For-profit companies do. And when they get hacked and expose all of your data so scammers can assume your identity for eternity, they can’t be held liable or responsible. All of that just so lenders can feel safer about who they give money to.
I’m actually part of a credit union and would recommend it to many people. The credit union didn’t get interest rates as low as what the big banks did a few years ago, but they’re also not as high as the big banks are currently.
One thing I really liked about the credit union was that they didn’t use my credit score when deciding my interest rate, they only checked it to make sure it didn’t have any glaring issues. Also I like that the credit union doesn’t sell my mortgage to a third party.
I also would recommend credit unions over banks. I have a local one that I use but I also have an account with PenFed, which is open to the whole nation and is one of the few places that offers a 2% unlimited cashback on everything no-fees card.
Regulate how? It’s a tool for lenders to decide if they want to lend or not, and on what terms. If the government was to make one, banks would still make their own because it’s for them to decide how to do business.
What would the government do? Prevent banks from using tools to make decisions?
Regulate how? It’s a tool for lenders to decide if they want to lend or not, and on what terms.
And also a tool for landlords to decide whether or not to rent to you, for insurers to decide what your rates should be, and employers to decide whether or not to hire you. It isn’t just about bank loans.
What about transparency? Sure, you can request a free copy of your credit report… once per year. Any more often than that and you have to pay. How do I dispute errors or inaccuracies on my report? How do the big three calculate my credit score? Why do each of them come up with a different number for the same individual despite sharing a similar set of parameters, and which one is used against me if I am denied for something on the basis of poor credit? What happens when they mishandle my sensitive data like my Social Security number, and what kind of legal options do I have to seek recompense?
You might be surprised to learn that the government does in fact regulate consumer reporting agencies. Ever heard of the Fair Credit Reporting Act? A lot of those rules came about from the systemic abuse of the clients of these credit reporting firms, including institutional racism.
The question is, why are these firms still allowed to operate as independent agencies and not as an apparatus of the state? What is the value of having these entities be private?
I don’t disagree that these services are necessary for our economy to function, and we can’t just tell people that they can’t come up with a system to determine loan risk for their clients, but there are some serious problems with the way credit scores work and how they are used in making certain decisions that should, in my opinion, be handled by an entity not concerned with making a profit off of their mostly unwilling clientele.
I think the way it could be approached would be for a government agency to start doing their own, force company to report the information to their service, and to provide the service free for individuals, and cheap for corporations.
It would then be relatively fair for individuals to be allowed to deny these companies the right to get their data
This way, the credit agencies would be free to do whatever they want, but they would have to step their game up, or just get obsoleted.
Taking this logic to the extreme, wouldn’t someone with liquidity but no credit score face serious issues towards accessing housing and services, as per the post?
I’m in this boat and it kind of sucks. I have a lot of savings after a few decades being a programmer, but my credit history consists of nothing but a few late bill payments over the years - never had a credit card or a house or car loan. To rent an apartment I always had to get my brother or father to co-sign the lease, or else I would just rent a room from somebody (which usually never required a credit check). I can’t get a credit card from a bank or even cards from stores.
On the other hand, it kind of doesn’t suck since I have no debt whatsoever, and I just bought the house I’ll spend the rest of my life in for cash. For the last fifteen years I’ve driven cars I bought for cash on eBay or Autotrader. There were times in my life when if I’d had access to easy credit I would have dug a big hole for myself, and the (very rational) unwillingness of anybody to lend me money saved from financial disaster.
If you’re good with your money, you should at least consider cards with cash back rewards. You can get cards that give you 2% back on everything. BCP will give you 6% on groceries but comes with a $95 annual fee.
I always pay my cards the moment a charge posts. No point in carrying debt and risking paying any interest.
My mortgage company didn’t even look at my credit score once they saw my savings and income, which were REALLY not that much, just OK. But apparently good enough. So, I think credit score is only one thing they look at, and other positive things can outweigh a negative score.
What were your savings, if you don’t mind? I managed to get a house priced at 274k this year with only 20k saved, but a really good credit score, and about 100k income between me and my partner.
I don’t remember exactly, but it was probably not far off 20k saved with more like 50k income. House price was quite a bit lower than that, no equity from any previous homes owned.
Credit score usually just determines what your interest rate is. Not whether you get the loan or not. Your cash flow (direct deposits) are more indicative of whether u can pay the loan vs credit score.
“I want your money but I don’t want you to see how trustworthy I am. Just give me money”
Seriously how entitled is everyone these days. It is not a human right to borrow money, you are at the mercy of the banks because your are asking them for a favour. If you don’t like that, don’t ask them for money.
You always have the other option. Build savings instead, but then you have to wait for the things you want and you might have to live with family while doing so. I’m not saying this path is easy, but I’m not the one objecting to a lender wanting to know how good or bad I am with money before expecting them to risk theirs.
Not everyone has family they can stay with. Many have shit credit due to health conditions that are not their fault. Credit checks are increasingly used for apartment leases and car insurance. Is it entitled for a person to think they should be able to have a place to live?
“Not everyone has family they can stay with.” No I know that. Which is why I said it’s not easy to go this path.
“Many have shit credit due to health conditions that are not their fault. "
Which is not an argument for " give me your money without looking at my past” it’s an argument for mitigating circumstances to be better considered.
“Credit checks are increasingly used for apartment leases and car insurance.”
This is wrong. A security deposit is the landlords financial guarantee. I also think insurance should be based solely on driving record, not age , gender or where you live.
“Is it entitled for a person to think they should be able to have a place to live?”
If they expect to be lent money for it, no questions asked them it is absolutely the definition of entitled. You are not entitled to a place to live on someone else’s money. It is your responsibility to provide for yourself and your family. I’m all for expanding welfare programmes, help to buy schemes, rent control etc etc. Those things are something we all pay into and provide us with a safety net is bad things happen. Those things should make sure you are able to have a place to live, but don’t expect a bank to lend you 500k to buy a house without some idea of is they can trust you.
Now in saying some of this I find myself in the dirty position of siding with rich banks. I am not intending to do that because I hate that they make shit loads and squirrel it away for themselves, charge me for borrowing when I’m in negative and pay me back very little for using my money when I’m in positive. This is not about that, I’m only interested in what is fair in the isolated transaction of one party pending another money. Wouldn’t you want to know how likely you are too get back your money if you were the lender? Would you lend money to your friends with a gambling problem? Is the current system of credit check fair? Not exactly. It should be enough to be able to demonstrate financial responsibility. I paid rent for 20 years without missing a payment, but it wasn’t enough to demonstrate financial stability or responsibility and that is plain wrong.
What I hate the most is how your score goes down for paying off a loan early. Getting penalized for actually being financially responsible is infuriating. I paid off my car less than 2 years into a 5 year loan and my score went down a couple dozen points. Just because they couldn’t get more money from interest.
Interestingly our poster here has put the reason, I hadn’t thought about it that way, but how valuable you are to creditors is what the score is. Paying off early losses then some money, so score goes down. Hilarious. What an amazing system! ☹️
Oh goody. Just thought of another amazing use for ai! You could use it to figure out the maximum length and interest a single borrower would be expected to pay and set the terms on that! Wunderbar!
You know there are people in bank and credit institutions that have been doing this for centuries? Probably millennia… EU explicitly requires that some of this is done by what you call AI (i.e. mathematical models) because they are fairer than humans and safer for customers and society
Just a small correction because I worked around that area (not for loans but for investment), it’s all Algorithms rather than AI.
Algorithms are basically mathematical formulas turned into code, whilst AI is a totally different beast that can produce quite different results on slightly different inputs and it’s not really made by turning mathematical models into code but rather it’s trained with real world data containing inputs and outputs and “somehow” finds the patterns in that data and can predict the correct outputs if given fresh, never seen before inputs.
AI is probably used for fraud detection (and I expect nowadays it’s likely used in algorithmic trading to try and predict market movements) but unless a lot has changed since I was in the business, it’s not used for valuations.
It was just to give an idea that what OP mentioned is already an established thing, fairer than alternatives.
Most of the time trivial linear logistic regression is used in this context. Nowadays decision tree ensambles are pretty heavily used, which are ML. Simply they perform better with fewer data than neural networks on structured tabular data.
What you refer to as AI is probably methods based on deep learning. The truth is that they work exactly as any other algorithm that you are referring to. They are used for regression and classification, same way as a standard linear regression. The difference is that the models are non linear, and their complexity is so that a lot of data are needed to train them.
But conceptually one can absolutely create a credit score with deep neural networks. It is just an overkill, for performances that are likely worst than a random forest on relatively small training datasets
Neural networks-based methods are indeed used in fraud detection
We don’t need more discrimination in loan approval. A few years ago, Amazon built an AI that would look at resumes and rate how likely the candidate would be hired. The AI trained itself to recognize female sounding resumes (went to women’s only college, is involved in women’s organizations, does not use manly enough language) and flag those as undesirables.
Ah ok. I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard that AI could sometimes be negative toward commonly discriminated against groups because the data that it’s trained with is. (Side note: is that true? someone pls correct me if it’s not). I jumped to the conclusion that this was the same thing. My bad
An AI is only as good as its training data. If the data is biased, then the AI will have the same bias. The fact that going to a women’s college was considered a negative (and not simply marked down as an education of unknown quality) is proof against the idea that many in the STEM field hold (myself included) that there is a lack of qualified female candidates but not an active bias against them.
That’s not why it went down. It probably went down because they had less credit extended to them after paying off the loan. How much credit you’re using affects your score.
They don’t care that u paid it off early. They care that your loan to income ratio just took a hit.
That doesn’t really make sense either. Why would a high amount of debt relative to income be a good thing? How does it indicate a person is more likely or capable of paying off a loan? If anything it means the opposite.
The specific rule you point out is stupid but easy to hack. Your score didn’t go down because they lost the interest you’d have paid. When you pay off a secured debt, the loaned amount is deducted from your total credit potential, which increases your utilized credit percentage. The hack is to open a line of credit against the secured asset before it’s paid off or another line of unsecured credit. Your credit utilization will drop, thus increasing your score.
My score is over 800 and has been for over a decade. I have like 12 credit cards but only use 2 and pay them off every month… Costco for the store and gas and a high cash back card for everything else. The others I keep open with 1 small purchase each year. Every store wants you to have one, so they’re easy to get. I have added and paid off multiple small to medium (10-60k) secured loans over the years and my score only fluctuates a little for a few weeks then goes back because my total credit with the dozen credit cards is so large.
But most people won’t need to do that any way, it’s overkill for like 99% of people.
If you have a credit card that you use and pay off regularly, a couple of paid off car loans or something like that and no overdue bills on your history, you’ll be absolutely fine.
Exploits A) often benefit the player by letting them skip a lot of work with big rewards, and B) usually get fixed real fast.
Now if doing this meant you never had to work a job in your life again and you could get actually make significant income, sure, I’d consider it an exploit.
Where would one look to find a high cash back card? I’ve been wanting to improve my score by switching to using a credit card for primary shopping that I pay off, but I can’t seem to find any good offers/deals/contracts/whatever term you’d use for a credit card. Probably my score though.
For simple cashback without yearly fees, 2% on everything or 5% on some things is about as good as it gets. I do everything on chase for simplicity and I’ve been reasonably happy with them. Twice now they have detected someone trying to use my credit card number (not sure how they got it), stopped it, and alerted me instantly. I mostly use the freedom unlimited card which was one of the better cards when I got it a few years ago.
You don’t understand how credit scores relate to loans then, let me help you.
The credit score is not just how likely you are to repay your loan. It’s how reliable of a borrower you are. They spend resources analysing the transaction, then allocate some funds for you with the expectations that these funds will be returned given a certain schedule. When you repay too fast, it’s not what’s happening.
Try to see it the other way around. If you were keeping some funds on-hand to lend, and you spent the whole evening deciding if you’re going to lend me 10k$ for months. You decide you will, and you’ll make 500$ out of it. Not a bad deal: these funds would come at you 300$, so you spent your evening for 200$. Great!
Two days later, I bring you back your 10k and 10$ of interest.
It means you spent your whole evening for 6$…
If I do that to you a few times, I guarantee you that you won’t like me as a borrower.
Not just paying a loan off early, even having the loan eventually drop off the credit report completely. This month the only change was an old, paid-off mortgage and line of credit dropped off my credit report. My credit score dropped substantially.
If you aren’t aware, that is very much incorrect. All you’re doing is lining the pockets of the credit card company. Pay your credit card statement in full each month and don’t carry a balance to avoid paying interest.
There are certain exceptions, but I’m considering them out of scope for this case.
You need to have a form of credit, like a credit card. Even if you pay it in full every month, that’s still debt. In my native country almost nobody owns credit cards, just debit cards. I’ve been living in the US for 12 years now, building credit wasn’t that hard, but it took several years, I have almost perfect score now and own a house, but the whole idea was dumb to me too when I started. And I still need to remind my wife that the money in our bank accounts is not really how much we have, because we need to subtract credit card balances out of it.
Well, this it ignores the external costs. Companies are charged by the credit processors and those fees get passed to customers. Some vendors will explicitly charge more for credit, but most vendors just raise prices for everyone. The amount of money you get in points doesn’t cover the added costs.
You’re not wrong… but as you said, those are external costs. While it’s fine to wish for a simpler, more equitable system, given that the prices are mostly the same no matter how you pay, wouldn’t you rather be part of the group receiving the benefits? Paying with cash or check or a non-reward card is leaving money on the table. The cost of handling cash and checks isn’t necessarily any lower than credit card processing fees and people don’t have much tolerance for strange new forms of payment, which leaves merchants without much leverage to push back against rules which prevent them from passing on the higher costs of the reward cards to those using them.
I’d rather see all companies pass their fees only to those using credit cards. Then there are no external costs and everyone is in the clear about what’s going on. I like the convenience of credit cards, and sometimes I’d be happy to pay the extra fee. Other times I don’t. I suspect many people are the same eay.
In the US it was ruled that card companies cannot stop vendors from passing on costs, so you see a lot more of that now. By raising awareness of the issue, it will continue to progress toward that system. It will also foster competition, where card processors will be inclined to lower fees because customers will see the charges, whereas before they were invisible.
I’ve seen “cash discounts” in many places but that’s a bit of a false economy as cash can cost just as much to handle as an average credit card in the form of security and “shrinkage”. I’ve never seen a business charge a higher rate based on what kind of card you use, which is what it would take to have an impact on the rewards system.
Are we from the same country? Debt is something I don’t understand unless for a home or a car. If I have money to buy a tv, I pay in advance, or I wait until I have the money. I am not judging different points of view, just this is how I was raised
If you have $500 for a few TV, and you want a positive credit score, buy the TV with a credit card. Then, before the interest kicks in, pay off the credit card.
I just wanted to make sure that the 4chan OP wasn’t referring to debt as carrying a balance and paying interest. I know two people who were previously under this incorrect assumption and basically giving away money for free to their credit card companies.
Are you confusing debt with credit line/limit, or am I misunderstanding your comment?
If you are referring to debt, could you provide me with a source for your claim?
I linked to myfico.com in my previous comment which is run by FICO - the company behind the FICO score. I think they would know a thing or two about what affects your credit score.
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