Hacker News Reader

Comment by atlgator | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t like about this type of journalism is how they use one instance to set up a boogeyman that they want to scare all of society with. The woman had a 632 credit score in 2021. The average American FICO score was 714 at the same time. She was well below average at a time when housing demands are at all time highs.

https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-is-the-aver...

View on HN

Fresh out of college it probably took me several years to reach 700. You have no credit history. I applied for a card in college and coupled with no income, all I qualified for was a secured card. Got denied from the usual suspects of cash back cards for a while. Then once I got cards my limit would only be like $500 per card so you would max it frequently if you used it as a normal person would unless you remembered to pay it off every week. It probably took four or five years for a credit card company to give me a reasonable limit in the thousands, and that came from the bank that I had an account with for 15 years prior.

I was denied a secured credit card when I had a job paying $65k/yr. A secured credit card. How can you be denied for that? I don’t know but I managed. I had 0 credit history btw. Literally none.

When I finally got to $110k/yr I was able to get a $300 credit limit card.

It's crazy how everyone has a different experience. I was given a $300 non-secured credit card while I was in college with no income. They automatically raised it to 12.5k over time without even asking me.

Which is why this shadow credit score shit is even more absolutely appalling.

Did you co-sign student loans with your parents? That's one of the easiest ways to build credit.

I did not. I think it may have been because it was a credit union associated with the college I was going to.

When I was first building my credit I did a bunch of research and found a credit union that would let me take out a 12 month secured loan and then used the proceeds from the loan to open a secured credit card. I immediately paid off all but one payment on the loan pushing out my due date to the 12th month and scheduled an autopay for the final payment (this way I only had to pay a trivial amount of interest). This particular credit union has their secured cards "graduate" to unsecured cards after 1 year of on-time payments. Right before the card "graduated" I dumped all the savings I had into the card. They returned my security when the card "graduated" and I was left with a 12 month on time installment history and a significant unsecured credit line. After that I didn't have any problems getting approved for other cards with limits sometimes even eclipsing my annual income. I figured all this out just by reading web forums.

I've never missed a payment, have over 6 years of on time payments, never even carried a balance on a card, and never been denied an application, yet my score has dipped as low as 640 just because of a "high" amount of credit checks, because I like to take advantage of "spend $1000 on our card and get $200" promotions that come in the mail. 630 doesn't necessarily mean anything bad at all.

I didn’t use the word bad. I said below average. It’s a quantitative observation. When housing demand is at all time highs apartments can be as selective as they want. If they have 20 applications for a single open unit who are they picking?

And that's why I think average kinda sucks here. Who is the average person renting? Maybe they are low income, maybe they are fresh out of college with no credit history at all, but in either case its probably a different makeup of financial backgrounds than what you see in homeowners and therefore the population on aggregate. Lumping these groups into the general population which includes homeowners who have been paying off credit cards for decades makes no sense. Consider the context when determining what these numbers should be, otherwise you are misrepresenting the shape of your data.

That’s not the typical credit card user behavior. It’s a well known risk of churning. You trade the rewards of credit card signup bonus with the lowering of credit score. It tends to rebound quickly though.

'That’s not the typical credit card user behavior. It’s a well known risk of churning'

Neither of those statements justifies the system as morallly right or even logical

The boogeyman is real. I recently moved to a new place and the things I had to submit: 1. Driving license 2. Bank Account statements 3. Credit report (which you can provide or they can pull for a fee) 4. Employment letters / 3 recent paystubs 5. Tax documents for the last year 6. Reference of previous landlord

Ohh and on top of providing these, the lease is provisional and can be terminated based on the results of the background check they do for you. Yeah no, the boogeyman is real and is worse than the credit score boogeyman.

Is that a result of shadow credit score or was it because there was a nationwide moratorium on evictions for 18 months due to covid?

If I’m an apartment manager and I know I can’t evict anyone for an indefinite time, it makes sense to verify every piece of evidence I can that applicants will pay, because if they stop paying there’s nothing I can do and I’m losing money every month.

Its been like that for years, the moratorium has nothing to do with it.

coincidentally, as far as I know, US Court precedent works exactly the same way, in that a single, real world case is the setting for deciding the applicability, reasonableness and effectiveness of laws on the books, not the "spirit and principle in general" .. IANL

Even a single court case is a complex evaluation of current law and precedent to that point. This on the other hand is a straw man fallacy.

Kind of.

Most court cases do not set any precedent. If you think the judge made a legal mistake in your case, you can appeal regarding that specific legal question.

The appalete court can then issue a ruling on that specific question of law. If they find the lower court was in error, they would typically send it back to the lower court to redo under the new guidance.

Sometimes the specifics of the case do interfere with the appelet court's judgement, but the entire system is set up to minimize that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com