You can have ruined credit without owing any money, and it takes a very long time for it to go away. See also: "I was declared deceased three times and it dest

You can have ruined credit without owing any money, and it takes a very long time for it to go away. See also: "I was declared deceased three times and it destroyed my credit" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19656322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19656322 https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/bctflo/i_have_been_declared_deceased_for_15_months_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/bctflo/i_h... You can also have ruined credit through no actions of your own, without knowing that you do, until that day you try to rent an apartment or a phone contract or whatever, and everywhere turns you down and you don't know why. You can also have ruined credit, oddly, while having a large amount of savings at the same time. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK, the credit reference agencies don't keep track of bank deposits (even though they do keep track of bank overdrafts), so you can have say £100,000 in the bank, while being unable to get a £1000 limit credit card or £1000 loan (which you might choose if you wanted to keep the £100k in a tax-efficient account), not even at the same bank. It's surprisingly easy to have a ruined credit rating through no fault of your own, without knowing, if you aren't obsessive about checking. For example: When the credit reference agencies (CRAs) hold incorrect information about you. Or accounts that don't exist and which have entirely fictional transactions on them, which of course are never paid because they aren't real and start flagging as "overdue", because some utility leaves accounts that are closed open in the CRA files for years later, and then add bogus transactions years later, which magically disappear when you ask the company if you owe them anything (I'm looking at you BT). In the UK, if your CRA record address doesn't match a local government address for you, there's quite a severe penalty to the credit score. Most people don't know that, but CRA data often has errors like that, which can be difficult to correct (I'm looking at you Equifax "it will take us 8 weeks to respond to your complaint, and please send us a copy of your passport"). Eventually you may find this out and call each of them individually to make a correction. And then find, each time you correct it, it periodically gets replaced with incorrect data automatically, because some system has an incorrect address database and uses it to automatically "improve" data back to the erroneous version (I'm looking at you Experian).