I always assumed credit scores were an integral and historic part of the American financial system.
They were not, they are very recent，most of your parents didn’t have credit scores growing up, and as you can probably tell or at least intuit, it’s mostly just a b******* scheme for those with capital to accrue more capital by invading your privacy.
FICO is kinda stupid in some ways but with responsibility it’s not hard to get a decent rate/favorable score. Yes at the top end is dumb you need to open more credit but in practice that’s not hard to do assuming you aren’t just forced by circumstances to just live off credit.
It only takes one mistake to absolutely crater years of effort.
It takes one pretty big fucking mistake to crater years of effort. I understand it does happen, usually around homes and employment, to which I would agree we need protections. It’s not for small shit.
Missing a utilities payment by a month will do. Utility companies are often more limited than other services in how they can shut off your service (for good reasons), so they’re very unforgiving about hitting you in the credit score. It’ll stay on for 10 years, and will likely keep you below 700 for the duration even if you do everything else perfectly.
7 years is the limit for late payments. 10 years is for certain types of bankruptcies.
A single missed payment typically is a small ding and not effect your credit in a major way. Bankruptcy is going to in almost all cases multiple delinquency and debts. I don’t agree that bankruptcy will fuck your day up.
I’ve had several missed payments to utilities the most recent being 3 months late(dumb auto pay shit) and have zero marks and an 830.
My mother (dumb and irresponsible) had missed payments and none of those hit her scores either. I don’t believe this is wide spread from my personal experience and a quick Google doesn’t return anything promising so I’m not sure I can agree with that at all.
FICO and VantageScore aren’t even looked at when they do a full credit record pull when you apply for something. Reviewers look straight at your history directly and make decisions based on that. Scores are for laypeople to get a general idea of how their history might appear to a reviewer, but every lender has their own criteria.
Yup, and it becomes very apparent when you get into home loans vs credit lines. The verification goes way up since the last housing crisis.
I believe they do use FICO but not necessarily the score itself. FICO has numerous models that can be used depending in the type of loan:
https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-repair/what-is-a-fico-credit-score/
That’s a pretty big assumption.
And yes, you can manipulate this system, and everybody tells you how to do it, but I don’t think it’s something that anybody should have to do in a world where loans can be determined case by case rather than predetermined based on circumstances outside of your control.