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> if you don’t have a loan history, your score isn’t low enough that you can’t get an apartment This is not true. Many places will deny an applicant for zero l

by jorf 4y ago

> if you don’t have a loan history, your score isn’t low enough that you can’t get an apartment This is not true. Many places will deny an applicant for zero loan history, effectively forcing people to get a credit card in order to obtain housing.

kube-system 4y ago
Technically, people with no credit history aren't denied for having low score -- they're denied for not having a score at all.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
That never happened to me when I came back from China (unable to get a credit card for 9 years because I didn’t have a Chinese ID card, so no credit history within the 10 year window they keep track), nor did it happen to my wife, who obviously didn’t have any history as a new immigrant. We didn’t have problem getting a rental with proof of job/income. And without the job/proof of income, even with 10 credit cards, many of these places won’t rent to you regardless of your credit rating given eviction laws. I get it, there must be some place that denies rental based on lack of credit history, but I would guess it is so rare that you’d have to stretch really hard to find an example.
SilasX 4y ago
Correct, but a nitpick: it's not quite an issue (as the parent said) of the score being low per se. From my own experience, in the time when I had no credit history, when I went on annualcreditreport.com or the alternatives, it would happily tell me that I had a credit score of 720-740, but any time I would apply for an apartment, or even the most usurious credit department store credit card, I would get rejected. So yes, the lack of a credit history makes you look artificially like a bad risk, leading to rejections, but not because the system reports you as "normal person with low credit score" -- that would actually be an improvement! For those who want to know, I eventually got out of the catch-22 by following up with the service department of a financial-advisor-affiliated credit card, and answering some questions like about employment history.

by jorf 4y ago

kube-system 4y ago

Technically, people with no credit history aren't denied for having low score -- they're denied for not having a score at all.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

That never happened to me when I came back from China (unable to get a credit card for 9 years because I didn’t have a Chinese ID card, so no credit history within the 10 year window they keep track), nor did it happen to my wife, who obviously didn’t have any history as a new immigrant. We didn’t have problem getting a rental with proof of job/income. And without the job/proof of income, even with 10 credit cards, many of these places won’t rent to you regardless of your credit rating given eviction laws. I get it, there must be some place that denies rental based on lack of credit history, but I would guess it is so rare that you’d have to stretch really hard to find an example.

SilasX 4y ago

Correct, but a nitpick: it's not quite an issue (as the parent said) of the score being low per se. From my own experience, in the time when I had no credit history, when I went on annualcreditreport.com or the alternatives, it would happily tell me that I had a credit score of 720-740, but any time I would apply for an apartment, or even the most usurious credit department store credit card, I would get rejected. So yes, the lack of a credit history makes you look artificially like a bad risk, leading to rejections, but not because the system reports you as "normal person with low credit score" -- that would actually be an improvement! For those who want to know, I eventually got out of the catch-22 by following up with the service department of a financial-advisor-affiliated credit card, and answering some questions like about employment history.