ObjectivityIncarnate

a guy that brought his Charlie Kirk flag
‘what the fuck even is a Charlie Kirk flag?’

Well…can you tell us? You’re the one who saw it, lol.

Did you really tell someone else that they need a bit of mental gymnastics to not make an assumption?

If enough people assume something about you, it’s true

Great life lesson for the kids.

the credit report disclosure clearly indicates that our score took a hit because we don’t carry a balance.

Are you paying your cards off before the statement cycle ends, resulting in your statement reading $0 every month? “No recent revolving balances” means that, as far as the credit reporting agencies know, you haven’t been using your card at all for 3+ months (emphasis added)^[1]:

“No recent revolving balances”—another way to say your credit cards are all paid off—sometimes appears as a FICO® Score risk factor. To be included in a credit score calculation, accounts need to show activity over time. By making a small purchase each month and then paying the balance in full, you will demonstrate that you are a good credit risk. The balance on your billing statement is what is usually shown in your credit report. Even though you’ve paid the balance in full, your credit report would show the balance, indicating activity in your account and helping your score.

You should let the statement cycle end with the balance of whatever you used it for, and then pay it off, anytime between that day and your due date. As long as you pay it off no later than your due date, you’ll still pay no interest, but paying it off before the statement ends prevents the agencies from even realizing that you used the card at all, because the agencies can’t see your actual credit card usage activity. They see only:

• statement balance
• (if it’s nonzero) payment status
  • ‘did you pay at least the minimum?’
  • ‘did you pay on time/by the due date?’

I also have a plus 800 credit score, but it would be higher if I made a habit of paying the bank lots of interest income.

No, it wouldn’t. Interest paid is not a factor at all—the credit reporting agencies literally have no way of knowing what portion, if any, of your statement balance is interest, they’re only provided the bottom line total statement balance.

Also, if you’re over 750, any further increase is ‘gravy’ anyway, almost no lender has a tier higher than that. The highest ‘breakpoint’ I’ve ever seen is 780. Even if what you said was accurate, ‘I’m over 800 but it could be higher’ is a distinction without a difference.

So all available reporting says my credit score went down when I paid off my loans and has remained in this new lower state for months since, but the secret real number used to decide my fate maybe didn’t.

There’s no maybe. I already explained how it works. The only part of it that’s ‘secret’ is the minutia of the score tabulation, to make it harder to game. Loans closed in good standing (i.e. you paid them off) are part of your credit report for 10 years.

Get the fuck out of here with that. Credit scores are purely a value used by lenders to determine how much money can be extracted from a consumer.

This is demonstrably bullshit.

Someone who maxes out a credit card, and then only pays minimum payments, and always makes them late, is, via interest accruing and late payment fees, making the lender basically the maximum amount of profit possible. And yet doing this will result in a garbage credit score, because using every penny of your credit limit is very detrimental to your credit score, and not making payments on time is extremely detrimental to your credit score.

Meanwhile, take me, someone who never pays a cent of interest, because he pays off his card every statement cycle (and on time, naturally), and because of card rewards, I’m the one profiting, the lender is literally the one paying me, and ‘yet’, my credit score is in the 800s.

So how do you reconcile that with your assumed truth quoted above? It’s very hard to understand how anyone can arrive at the conclusion you did, while also knowing (as I assume you do) that late payments simultaneously hurt your credit score and increase profit for the lender, just as one example.

It goes down if you’re delinquent

As it should—the whole point of the score is to rate your reliability in repaying what you borrow.

it goes down it you pay things off early without racking up all the interest they wanted

False. You will never be worse off after paying a loan off early than you were before you took out the loan. Again, I haven’t paid a cent of interest on my credit cards in over a decade, and I paid off the only car loan I ever had, really early, less than a year into it.

it goes down if you don’t run enough of a balance on your credit cards.

Also false. Higher utilization is BAD for your credit score, not good. You’re saying literally the opposite of what’s true, do you realize that? You might want to google ‘credit score myths’ and find an article on bankrate or nerdwallet to educate yourself, you’ve been massively misled about this, honestly.

It doesn’t protect consumers

It gets good borrowers like me lower interest rates, and higher credit limits.

it barely protects lenders

Pretty sure the lenders would heavily disagree with that, lol. For very obvious reasons, anyone who’s considering lending someone money is going to be very interested in what happened the last X times that person was lent money.

it’s purely used to determine how much can be extracted from a consumer’s bank account.

Still false the second time.

Terrible name, just sounds like you’re saying you’re affiliated with FIFA, lol

One caveat. You do get dinged on your credit score if you are too responsible with your credit.

Untrue. I’m in the 800s, and all I did was consistently pay off my everyday-use credit cards every month.

You get dinged if you don’t carry a balance on your credit card.

Absolutely false:

Carrying a balance on a credit card to improve your credit score has been proven as a myth. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says paying off your credit cards in full each month is the best way to improve your credit score and maintain excellent credit for the long haul.

Credit reports ultimately rate how profitable you are to lenders

No they don’t, or else I, who has literally only profited off my credit cards via the combination of never paying interest, and utilizing cash back rewards from regular use, wouldn’t have a credit score in the 800s.

not how responsible you are with credit.

Explain my 800s score, then. They’re making literally negative profit from me.

If someone has one credit card that’s always maxed out, and while they’re always making payments on time, they’re minimum payments, so they’re accruing essentially the most interest they could possibly be accruing, I guarantee that person’s credit score is much worse than mine, even though there is no arguing that this hypothetical person generates way more revenue for the credit card provider. That refutes your assertion from the other direction.

And that’s without even mentioning how significant a negative influence 100% utilization has on the score.

They ding you on your score if you don’t carry a balance on your card.

This is unequivocally false. I can’t believe how pervasive this common misconception still is:

Carrying a balance on a credit card to improve your credit score has been proven as a myth. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says paying off your credit cards in full each month is the best way to improve your credit score and maintain excellent credit for the long haul.

Carrying a balance on your card literally can only hurt you, as the only thing the actual dollar amount of the balance impacts is utilization, in other words, ‘what percent of your total credit limit are you using’, and for that, lower is better. Plus, carrying a balance means paying interest, which is money down the drain on top of that.

I haven’t paid a cent of interest on any of my credit cards for well over a decade; I use it for my everyday purchases, and pay it off every month—my credit score’s firmly in the 800s, and 750 is the ‘you won’t get a better rate’ threshold for 99.9% of lending.

No, it didn’t. Maybe your score on Credit Karma did, but that’s because Credit Karma’s system of estimation (VantageScore I think it’s called) stops considering a loan the moment you pay it off, while the actual credit reporting agencies continue to consider it (re average age of accounts) for 10 years after closing if it was in good standing, or 7 years from ‘date of first delinquency’ if it was closed because of charge-off or something like that.

My own average account age is less than 10 years, yet my credit score is in the 800s, even though I have no outstanding loans, I just use my credit card for everyday purchases and pay it off every month.

So ‘get your ignorance the fuck outta here’ and open yourself to learning how things work.

Donny 2 Inches

Donny 2 Dolls

What are you even talking about at this point? lol

Yes credit scores are bullshit

They’re not. They exist for a very good reason, and are purely beneficial to people who repay what they borrow. They only ‘hurt’ people who don’t repay their debts, but only insofar as it makes it more difficult for them to take more money from people that they then also won’t pay back.

Credit scores are opaque ratings of people kept by private organisations

They are only opaque to the extent that reduces the ability to game them. It’s very common knowledge what the primary factors are that determine your credit score:

1. payment history (it makes perfect sense that seen as more risky to lend to, if you don’t make your loan/credit card payments on time). Also, the more consistently you make your payments on time, the more credit limit increases you get, which helps with—
2. utilization (it makes perfect sense that you’re seen as more risky to lend to, the closer to ‘maxed out’ you commonly are)
3. derogatory marks (e.g. being sent to collections, having your house foreclosed on, etc.; makes perfect sense for things like these to be considered evidence of you being risky to lend to)

Without paying a cent of interest, my credit score is in the 800s, simply because I use my credit card for everyday purchases, then pay off the statement balance each month, and have done this consistently.

used to refuse business to people effectively based on their spending & borrowing behaviour

“Refuse business” is deceptively overbroad—no entity will prevent you from fully paying for something in cash based on your credit score, for example. But they may refuse to lend to you, if you have a history of failing to repay money that was lent to you in the past.

There’s nothing shady about that, it makes perfect sense for one to be less willing to lend money to someone who has a reputation of not repaying their debts.

Without a credit score or similar system, lenders either will:

1. treat everyone with the same caution as they would someone who’s never borrowed anything before (which is detrimental to people who reliably repay their debts), if they’re ethical
2. guess at creditworthiness based on prejudices/biases/stereotypes of the immutable characteristics of the individual looking to borrow, inviting bigotry to play a major role in who gets loans, etc.

Credit scores are purely beneficial to good/reliable borrowers—it seems that invariably, those who have the biggest problem with them are unreliable borrowers who really wish they could hide the fact that they don’t repay their debts from the next entity they intend to get more ‘free money’ from.

Yeah, no way an omnipotent God could do anything about the lack of Y chromosomes. He can create a new life in the womb of a virgin woman, but put a Y in the kid? Nope, His hands are tied, apparently.

Come on, lol.

a women

I will never understand why this particular error is so common, yet it seems no one ever makes the similar mistake “a men” when referring to a single man.

It’s not “capitalism alone”, but it’s clear that capitalism was a massive catalyst in accelerating that success, hence my emphasis on “how far we came in such a short period of time”.

In 1820, 94% of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty. By 1910, this figure had fallen to 82%, and by 1950 the rate had dropped yet further, to 72%. However, the largest and fastest decline occurred between 1981 (44.3%) and 2015 (9.6%).

Greed isn’t just wanting good for yourself, it’s wanting more than what is reasonable.

“What is reasonable” is the furthest thing from an objective measure, no matter how much you believe your definition of it is the definition of it.

You’re the one believing a myth—world history already contains plenty of information to back up what I just wrote. Check global poverty rates a century ago, compared to today, for one. It’s almost miraculous just how far we came in such a short period of time! And no, it wasn’t just because of China.

1. Corruption makes it possible for greed to be rewarded in any system.
2. Greed is not necessarily a net negative—one’s personal avarice can be ‘addressed’ by creating and selling a product that the public is happy to pay (an amount that creates profit for them) for. That sort of ambition should be encouraged, because the result is a better outcome for everyone.

I think we can do better than that

Maybe we can. But of everything that’s been tried so far, capitalism has by far worked the best.

So if there is a better way, it’s got to be a brand-new idea.

There is no other system immune to the potential negatives within capitalism, while no other system has shown to have as many positives as capitalism has had, over its history.

Don’t be surprised if those negatives magically persist within a different system. The grass is always greener—you’re better off addressing the negatives directly (e.g. sensible legal regulations within the system), instead of naively assuming that changing the system will magically eliminate or even lessen them.

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