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The shitt9est thing about credit is that payments that don't improve your credit can still hurt it when you miss.
Late on rent or your cell phone plan? That's a ding on your credit report. You can't get a loan because you haven't established that you'll pay your debts.
Pay your rent on time for 30 years straight? No credit history. You can't get a loan because you haven't established that you'll pay your debts.
Stop trying to max your credit score. You don't win any extra prizes for having an 850.
Having a good credit score (>670) isn't difficult. Have a couple of cards, keep your balance under 1/3 of the limit, and pay it on time. That's it. You'll have a 700 in short order. Getting it above 750 is just more of the same.
I get that there are perfectly responsible people who don't leverage credit to gain their needs and then are rejected by the banks when they go looking for a 200k loan. But that's not the world we live in. Bill the Banker isn't the guy whose lived in your community for twenty years and goes to your church. That world is gone and had problems too.
This impersonal world sorta sucks, but I'm not close friends with my neighbors and some of them seem like people I wouldn't get along with anyways.
The real rub of it, in my opinion, is we are subject to these standards without being consulted or, really, considered.
But honestly, don't worry about maxing your credit score.
This post is about insurance premiums and has nothing to do with credit scores.
The post is about insurance premiums, but OPs title is very clearly about credit scores
Oh I see that now.
Problem is that those "non-persons" can't stay in their lane, and have to pollute and disrupt society with their predatory tactics, instead of going to some forest and "pulling themselves by their bootstraps" alone.
My dad paid off his mortgage and owned his vehicles outright. He had been that way for about 10 or 12 years when he tried to buy a small cabin. Even though his finances said he could buy it outright, he tried to get a small mortgage....the banks REFUSED to give him a mortgage. They said he basically didn't have a credit history. Its all made up bull excrement that screws with peoples lives for the fun of it.
"damn this guys responsible, we won't make a buck!"
fun fact, credit score is not a thing in most of the world.
And didnt exist until 1989 in the US. Credit scores and Tay Tay are the same age.
However if you were a minority or a woman it was also a bitch to get a loan prior to it. Though women couldn’t even have their own bank accounts till… the 60s/70s?
Women earned the right in the 60s, but it wasn't until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in '74 until banks were forbidden from requiring a husband's signature.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits financial institutions from discriminating against applicants based on their sex, age, marital status, religion, race or national origin.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/when-could-women-open-a-bank-account/
I worked for a Credit Union as a developer. I can attest that at least where I worked, there was a host of yearly modules you had to complete to ensure you were up to speed on how to not be an asshole and they took it quite seriously.
fun fact, neither is the social credit they complained that china had, but the western credit score is basically a social credit that punish people for not consuming beyond their means.
Yeah cuz a credit score measures how good you are at being a credit customer, not how good you are at money.
And for anyone in the US, just know that State Farm is one of the worst companies for Homeowners Insurance. They will pay the bare minimum. All insurance sucks, but State Farm is on a whole other level of suck. If you are with State Farm don't make the mistake I made and quickly find another company.
Seriously, leave State Farm. By not leaving I am now paying $20k that they should have covered.
Remember Katrina?
Like a grim reaper state farm is there
Someone t-boned (and totaled) my truck and they had State Farm for car insurance. Everyone involved acknowledged I was not at fault, except State Farm. They wanted to write it off as a mutual fault, which would mean they wouldn’t have to pay for my damages. They also never told my insurance company, because it was news to them when I mentioned it. I just hope my insurance doesn’t go up because of their ineptitude.
I just left a job with State Farm. They also the most expensive and go out their way to fuck you hard.
The real death of America is everyone drowning to death in made up fees.
No kidding! Way back in the 80s I had a US Bank account called "The Only Account". It was a checking and savings account where checking always had a balance of zero. When I wrote a check or withdrew money from an ATM, they automatically transferred money from savings to checking to cover it, and then the checking balance immediately went back to zero and that was that. No overdrafts. Ever. There was an annual fee of I think $20/year.
I don't know where that idea went, but banks and even credit unions now act like they never heard of such wacky nonsense. "Overdraft protection" consists of loaning you the money, no matter how much you have right there in your savings acct, and they charge a fee each time and of course also charge interest on the loan. Ridiculous.
I would love for each person living in the USA to reach zero debt. It would probably collapse the damn system. It’s ridiculous how much of it relies on you having debt and some stupid credit score.
After reading a good number of replies the thing that amazes me is that US banks aren't on fire right now.
When there's something about the model that doesn't make sense, find an alternative model where it does. It's often quite enlightening.
In the case of credit scores, the model you're probably thinking of is that following all the rules as written should make your credit score go up. But this is not the case. A better model is that credit score tells the bank how much money they can get out of you. They make more money from someone who is late every once in a while. That model is more consistent with reality.
that credit score tells the bank how much money they can get out of you.
This is the whole game, right here. It's their score for how they see you, with respect to exploiting your desire to purchase things, to make money. And to be clear, a big part of that math is how much interest you're likely to pay. If you keep paying things off, and don't usually carry a lot of debt, you're not as profitable a customer. The more you tend to pay interest for things, the higher your score.
Interestingly, a lot of this is not halal. Which means that Muslim banks have some creative workarounds for lending and helping their communities out. While I've never done this myself, it sounds like folks around here might find that an appealing alternative.
heh heh I am at the point where my mortgage is paid and I have no CC debt. I have some savings and retirement accounts. But I cannot rely on this since we have the Trump Tariff Taxes. So I suppose I cannot retire this year as I hoped. I have to save more. My dh is 3 years younger than me and really wants retirement... he is a construction union guy so I tell him to make an appointment w/their funds person and we can design a plan. I will likely continue working part time for the next 6 or 7 years to cover healthcare unless the Democrats pull their heads out of their asses.
make an appointment w/their funds person and we can design a plan
"Do you have two million dollars?"
"No."
"Plan to go back to work."
Its crazy, the only debt I've held is student loan debt and I have paid the bill every single month. Otherwise I use checks and a debit card, I had money to buy a used car upfront.
Went to get a credit card. My credit score is below 700, and I was deemed "unqualified" because, get this, I don't have a history of paying off debt, because I have not held enough debt to prove I can pay it off.
My credit rating is so bad that I had to have my brother co-sign a lease for me fifteen years ago. The landlord told him his credit rating was the highest he's ever seen. My brother (and his wife) were in debt up to their eyeballs - over $100K in credit card debt and a mortgage they were deeply underwater on. They're still in bad shape financially; meanwhile I now own my own home outright (having paid cash for a fixer-upper after saving up for a few decades). I still have shitty credit and it's not affecting me negatively in any way.
Just dealt with this. I didn't even exist in the credit system. I've even been told if I had BAD credit I would qualify for something.
Eventually I did get connected to a small local credit union and got a pretty good deal on interest as a 'first time buyer's program.
My premium nearly doubled because it's a manufactured house and it crossed the 25 year old line.
I have only one credit card which I charge everything to (credit limit is more than enough at over $10k) and which I pay off in full each month and have no absolutely debt, therefore my credit score is absolute dogshit.
Yes my car insurance jumped $100 the minute I paid off my car.
I've found that this is usually a "staying with a single insurance provider" problem. I usually end up switching every two years or so, but I check everytime my six month renewal comes up. I've found that my premiums pretty consistently go down so long as I keep looking around. The last few times I switched from geico to progressive then back to geico, and the cost went down each time I switched.
Fun fact. At the last call to make sure my insurance was switched over properly, I had the csr angrily explain that in order to get the same affect, all I had to do was ask for a reevaluation of my policy. It turns out that the automated systems that send out your new price every renewal don't do a good job of adjusting the premiums down and you're supposed to ask a person at the company to review things if you don't like the automatic price.
I plan on continuing my personal policy of switching providers every few years anyways. I'd rather have the new customer prices than deal with a person on the phone going through every option to see if the new price is actually better or worse than the competitors offers.
I had the csr angrily explain that in order to get the same affect, all I had to do was ask for a reevaluation of my policy
"If it's hurting your customer retention, it sounds like you stupid fucks need a reevaluation of your pricing policy"