4 ms·

I hate how opaque the whole idea of credit is. There should be some kind of score for "general financial responsibility" (based on income, spending, investment

I hate how opaque the whole idea of credit is. There should be some kind of score for "general financial responsibility" (based on income, spending, investment, bank account info), not "borrows a bunch of money and pays it off reliably." Right now, I have a little bit of debt, and about 10X that amount in savings, and everyone's told me to pay the debt off over time because it looks good. So that's what I'm doing, even though I hate the idea of having to pay interest. My dad has even had trouble securing loans since he paid his mortgage off.

camccann 17y ago
That's not what credit scores are for though. Imagine that you're going to be lending money with interest. What does your ideal customer look like? Someone who just pays you back a month later? No, because you're not getting much interest from them. Someone who has trouble making payments? No, too much risk of losing what you lend. Ideally, you want someone who consistently carries debt and pays it off slowly. There's also the matter of "handling debt well" not being the same thing as "general financial responsibility". While you might intend to pay it back quickly, that's not something the lender can just assume, and if you've never carried significant debt over a period of time they can't judge how you'll react if (for some reason) you can't pay it off quickly as you intended. There's also the issue of wondering why someone who's rarely carried debt wants credit--what changed to make them need it, and how does that impact the risk of lending to them? Short version: credit scores aren't really about you personally. They're about roughly estimating whether lending money to you would be profitable.