Fortunately, credit scores usually recover rather quickly from one-off delinquencies if you stay current afterward. And I bet you'll be paying more attention to your bills now, won't you?
The credit score is doing exactly what it's supposed to.
policing people and make the poor to pay more.
"Why are people defaulting on their bills!?"
The whole notion of transfer of majority responsibility to an individual is one of the slimiest things in this society. We get monitored by an array of hidden surveillance measures and algorithimic judgement we have no way to properly counter or defend ourselves against. Meanwhile central credit gets to borrow money and get bailed out.
Give me a fudging break.
You are trying to make everyone else responsible for my finances and I'd damn well thank you to stop, since they're mine.
1. Make a mockery of prudent allocation of money and get bailed out when their games get messed up
2. Mess up the purchasing power of any money you possess far more than any individual defaults or even class of individual defaults
3. Impose grave and hidden responsibilities on individual borrowers and mass surveillance...
They are messing up your finances far more than the most reckless individual borrowers ever could. *
PS - How is finance going to deal with the multitrillion dollar pension bomb? With prudence or with a combination of a game of musical chairs and chickens until stuff gets serious? How is your financial discipline, as an individual, going to protect you from manmade tsnumais?
As for your PS, I don't respond to conspiracy theories.
Is the World Economic Forum a purveyor of conspiracy theories? Is our reduced purchasing power at the level of food and rent a conspiracy theory?
Edit: My apologies, here's the actual WEF press release https://www.weforum.org/press/2017/05/global-pension-timebom...
My wife & I both have excellent credit scores, and we pay all of our bills in full every month. Nevertheless, I've noticed a ~50 point swing in credit scores from month-to-month, all dependent on whether airline tickets, furniture, or charitable contributions happened to make it onto this month's bill. Our debt-to-liquid-assets ratio is something like 0.1%, so there's never any real risk of not having money to pay it off, but of course the credit bureaus don't have information about our assets, so they evaluate us against what other people our age have, which (being Millenials) is not very much.
Knowing how the system works, we can take steps to game it, like not putting any major purchases on credit card in the 3-6 months before getting a mortgage. But still, it's slightly ridiculous that something that's supposed to measure your creditworthiness can swing so much over short time periods.
50 points also isn't likely to make much difference, especially if your score is already good. Loans basically go off tables. Essentially if you're between A and B, you get this rate for this losan, C and D gets this rate, etc.
Once you're past 700, you're already getting good interest rates and banks will fall over themselves to loan you money if your income supports the loan size. When I was at 780, the loan officer couldn't give me a lower rate on a mortgage - I was already getting a fraction of a percent over prime.
I wonder how much your ability to game it indicates whether you are likely to be a good or bad debtor?
I spend between $1000-$2000 on credit cards a month and collectively I generate statements with less than $10 spread across 4 cards. My credit score is rock solid from month to month.
If you have six figures of liquid assets (what 0.1% debt vs liquid assets implies) this should be no problem at all.
In any case, I read this as the notice that payment was required is what got lost, not the payment itself.
Let me tell you what I hear as a business person if you tell me my letter to you was misdelivered: "My mail delivery is unreliable so it's your problem."
Well, no, you didn't tell me it was unreliable, so I couldn't adjust my risk perception or take special precautions. And if you ever want to do business with me again, you're going to come in and execute the transaction on site and not leave with the goods until the bank confirms it's cleared.
On top of which, most billing contracts specify that payment is due whether or not you were notified. You are supposed to keep track, too.
And yes, this is okay, because until we have a proper socialist system, it is, in fact, our responsibility to pay our debts. Don't like it? Don't incur debts.
Anyway, we’re back to making it the responsibility of the customer with a thousand more important things to think about, rather than of the business that’s dedicated to the stuff.
And if you think it should be that way, great. But it’s obvious to me that it is that way because of the power imbalance, not because it’s right.
If you don’t make payments as agreed, your credit score goes down. If you do, it goes up, and will soon recover from the perfectly reasonable dip it took from your mistake. It’s pretty simple.
Is an oxymoron. Statistics exist when "you" is unknown.
Between the "Pay for Delete" scams and the gamifying of your credit score through services like CreditKarma I really questions how close these scores are hitting anymore in relation to relative credit risk.
Does that not qualify as extortion?
Thanks for making ridiculous assumptions and putting nonsense in my mouth. Nobody opined on anything in the first place. I was merely asking a legal question, because calling someone to demand an immediate payment to avoid direct harm to them sounds an awful lot like extortion, whether I like the approach or not.
If you want to know whether I'm impossible to satisfy or whether I think the company could in fact cut people slack while getting their $15 and avoiding potential extortion, you could just ask me. Yes, I think that's perfectly possible. Call the person up, tell them you'll waive the credit report if they make a payment by the end of the day, and optionally remind them that according to their contract, there is a $15 fee if they pay by phone. There. Now the person gets to spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it to make an informed decision. No need to put nonsense in my mouth.
Guess what popped up on my report this week?
A late payment.
It does not let you pick the autopay date, and instead puts it on the date the bill is due, otherwise I'd have it auto pay at the first of the month weeks before it was due. However, it is not worth my time to call and probably have to deal with a call center for an hour before I get someone that will promise to remove it and then have to write three letters to send off to the CRBs to dispute it and wait another couple of months for it to possibly get removed.
Places can report whatever they want to. And you can dispute it, but the person who report it will just say "no, we're right" and it'll stay up.
I've been fighting with Equifax and TransUnion for 5 years to remove 30 year old reports on my credit history (which are clearly not me because im less than 25 years old)
Following that logic the Burj Khalifa is a space elevator because no one has been able to build a better space elevator than that.
I have general objections to this sort of underwriting assessment being an ethical business for a private organization to begin with due to the immense amount of possibility for discrimination it opens up.
While there are certainly some arguments to be made about disparate impact under our current system basically everyone agrees that access to credit for minorities is much much better than it used to be.
I’m sure the existing credit bureaus are great for the people who give them money. They sure suck for the rest of us, though. Fortunately for them, we get zero say.
The thing is, we don’t get to choose whether we’re exposed to those risks. It happens whether we like it or not.
So let’s say I start a company that offers better TCO: my rates are a bit higher but this is more than made up for by a much lower fraud risk. Do I win the market? No, because Equifax’s fraud risk hits my customers just as much, so I’m not competitive.
Credit bureaus give us low rates because they externalize the costs. Since the costs are externalities, competition can’t beat them. It’s the financial equivalent of making cheap electricity by poisoning the community with emissions.
Why double down and try to make something that is already being gamed? The very definition of insanity is doing The same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
There is no right to operate a business that exposes everyone to risk they have no choice in whether to accept or not. Centralizing excessive amounts of data with obtuse and dubious control mechanisms/capacity for redress is a disaster waiting to happen.
Publicizing the risk, and privatizing the profits at it's finest.
To me, this entire industry reeks of people engaging in risky behavior, but trying to externalize the costs/risks of said risky behavior, and consequemces be damned. Furthermore, they want the agency that gets externalized to "make money", something which encourages the minimum amount of investment humanly possible in making sure they are actually solving the problem in a way that doesn't merely create new ones.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the financial sector is eating the bloody world; as the metrics they gather are being gleefully used as discriminators in far more than just loan granting.
The system is either so critical to the way the economy works, that we should be willing to "sink" money in the interests of making the system as effective as possible (I.e. no dark pattern B.S., easy to use controls, easy to manage all interactions with, and maintained to the highest degree of security), or it isn't, and a discussion needs to be had whether having such valuable pots of exploitable data is something we should even tolerate as an acceptable exercise.
To be quite honest, I've seen more harm than good come out of the system given the ubiquity of the Credit history "bootstrap" problem, and now the compromise of a huge portion of the American population's personal data.
Trying to couch this as merely a case of "oh, we just need more contracts" without addressing the central problem of your identity essentially being hijacked by a bunch of for profit involuntary surveillance companies operating under an incentive structure pushing minimum viable effort in protecting your data, ensuring it's correctness, and restricting access to only appropriate reasons.
Throw in the failure of the FTC to clearly levy a strong enough penalty leaves me feeling this industry is a social liability in it's current form.