this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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It’s not a perfect system. It’s just the best so far.
Everybody starts at the same baseline. Being born to a poor family doesn’t set you off lower than anyone else as far as credit goes, unless your parents start running up bills on your SSN, which happens, a lot. Cash and investments aren’t part of credit score at all.
Really as far as cash/cash-equivalent accounts go, just pre-paid credit cards that can impact credit, and they can only impact positively, and they are marketed exclusively towards the poor and those with bad credit.
If you want to be mad at anybody, really, it’s the predatory lenders. The payday advance companies, rent-a-centers, slumlords, and especially buy-here-pay-here car lots. Those guys that will sell and repo the same car over and over again when people don’t make payments with exorbitant interest rates.
Hell even Sprint PCS back in the day. They’d give anybody a phone with a $150 deposit.
All of them will pull a credit score at the start and then only report delinquent accounts. These are all aimed at people who are poor or have bad credit, and can only negatively impact the score.
Most of these are all run by sleazy local businessmen. Wealthy, but still exceptionally far from the super rich.
Honestly this sounds like one of the few times where the banks actually have the customers best interest (bank pun) in mind. The credit score formula is well understood (even if it’s not fully known by most people, since it’s proprietary). The risks and benefits are disclosed and agreed upon. Customers are expected to know how to use their products properly. If they do, the bankers may even sweeten the pot with some cashback or points, and provide an improvement to their reputation with the banks. If they don’t, they pay the pre-disclosed interest rates and late fees, and they earn a bad reputation with the banks.
I know it sounds like I’m shilling for the banks here. I’m not. I’m just saying this isn’t the right fight.
To turn it around, suppose you are a wealthy lender. You have three total strangers asking you to lend some cash. On what basis do you determine how risky it would be to lend them money? Or do you assume they are all an equal risk and give them all the same offer? Credit scores serve the purpose of determining how risky a credit customer is, based upon their reputation with others lending goods and services. Assuming an equal risk will either make you a loan shark, or you won’t be a wealthy lender for long.
Now, I’d be very impressed if the banks adopted a fully disclosed formula. It’s great that we can pull our full credit reports for free and see what they see, but what would be better would be to know exactly what they are basing their decisions on. It’s understandable that they’d want to keep that close to the chest, though. In a time of formula-based automatic approvals/denials, it’s only a matter of time until someone figures out how to game it.