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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Someone with poor credit may be assumed more likely to commit fraud or steal from the company. Someone with poor credit might also be assumed to be personally irresponsible and lazy, and more likely to slack off, ignore necessary details or cut corners.

It isn't fair but in the US money carries moral weight, and many people assume the less of it you have, the worse of a person you are.

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If you live in California your credit score can’t be factored into hiring unless you directly deal with company finances in a specific way, namely in the roles of accounting or finance.

Even if you’re a software engineer working on financial software you’re exempt because you have no direct and common access to the company purse.

There’s a few other states that have laws like this I can’t recall them though l

It's also possible that someone in debt would do something dishonest against the company, if a bad actor offered them money to do so.

Your statement is still true if you remove "in debt" from it. The question is whether or not being in debt (or having poor credit) meaningfully increases the chances of someone taking the offer from that bad actor. I'm not convinced it doe.

>It isn't fair but in the US money carries moral weight, and many people assume the less of it you have, the worse of a person you are.

This isn't about money, this is about debt. Owing money around really does sound like something a bad person would do.

>Owing money around really does sound like something a bad person would do.

Why would this be your default assumption? People can end up owing money for any number of moral reasons. I'd rather someone have 10,000 in debt because they borrowed to help someone with medical debt who would have died otherwise, than for that hypothetical person to die because of a lack of money. From there, it's easy to posit someone losing their job to be a caretaker for said hypothetical person. Et voilà, there's your unpaid debt yet (IMHO) for completely moral reasons. My opinion on debt has substantially changed once I encountered "Debt : the First 5,000 Years".

Why would this be your default assumption

I am not saying it is fair, or that I would make this assumption.

However, car insurance is the same way. If some indicator shows correlation with a bad driver, eg age, birth sex, type of car, rates go up!

Same thing with unpaid/delinquent debt. It is an indicator. If you have 10 good potential employees to hire, and one has bad debt....

Except no one has presented any evidence that bad debt is an indicator of job performance issues.

Car insurance providers have a ton of data that correlates all those factors you mentioned, so for the most part it's reasonably fair for them to set rates based on that. No such data exists when it comes to debt and employment, as far as I can see. Just a bunch of people here arguing back and forth for their personal opinion.

There isn't any evidence, it isn't actually true. Debt is inescapable in a country where a trip in an ambulance can wipe out a family's entire income. It's just a cultural prejudice born from the American idolization of free markets (which itself is a vestigial expression of European classism and belief in noble divinity), rugged individualism (and a pathological fear of societal bonds) and the Protestant work ethic, mixed with a bit of racism and xenophobia.

It isn't about owing money or even debt. You can be in a lot of debt and have good credit. You can also have very little debt and have very poor credit because you couldn't pay a hospital bill or didn't get the final electric bill from your old apartment paid before it went to collections.

It is really about keeping poor people out. You might be able to argue something about responsibility if you can prove that they could pay the debt and chose not to.

Disagree. There's no intent to keep poor people out. Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.

Creditors these days tend to treat medical debt separately--someone who has only medical debt probably is someone who is responsible but something happened to them. Likewise, back in the era of the housing collapse and strategic default creditors would look at someone who had a foreclosure but nothing else far more favorably than someone who had a variety of debt issues.

> Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.

No, that metric has nothing to do with it. The main things that affect your credit score are a) age of oldest credit line, b) on-time payment history, c) amount of available credit, d) credit utilization.

While "not spending too much" can be correlated to (b) and (d), it's not always a particularly strong correlation.

And even if you do all those things right, one bill -- even for $50 -- sent to collections (because your automated bill pay randomly stopped working and you didn't notice for several months -- this happened to me) can knock 50-100 points off your credit rating. Sometimes you can get this fixed, but the biller has no obligation to send a correction to the credit bureaus even if you pay the $50 and explain why you missed the bill. Enjoy waiting 7 years for that negative report to "scroll off" your score calculation. It just did for me a few months ago, and despite the fact that I have otherwise excellent credit, I was surprised how much my score went up after this was off my record.

Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.

No. Living within your means makes you wind up with no credit.

Utilities and landlords rarely report your on-time payments, after all. You have no history, and you need to prove yourself instead of the lenders assuming you are responsible.

And I'll mention here that different places hound folks with a recent bankruptcy, despite a variety of debt issues that led to bankruptcy.

And you can't even measure responsibility from whether or not it is medical debt. I struggled in my early to mid 20's because my then spouse wound up with a major mental health issue. He wound up on disability, and before (and sometimes after) would take money from our account or out of my purse. I know in hindsight that I should have taken different actions, but I didn't think about it in the midst of constant stress.

And at least I was finally able to leave, some years too late, but that shouldn't be required. I left due to unhappiness, not because of the illness. It would be worse if it were a child's sickness that caused the struggle - the bills might be in the spouse's name instead of yours. None of that would show up on a credit report.

Get a store card, use it for things you would have bought anyway. You can build from there. Note that your credit report doesn't really care about how much you borrowed, but how good you were about paying it back.

The presence of debt makes you more susceptible to bribes and blackmail.

Most homeowners have debt. So do lots of folks that own cars. And credit cards. And poor people unfortunate enough to wind up in the hospital with sub-par health insurance. And 18 year old college students with bad judgement about credit cards.

Are all of these folks more susceptible to bribes and blackmail? This is a sizeable portion of the population.

Does bad credit of someone that just declared bankruptcy make someone more susceptible?

Couldn't a company just lessen this by paying well so that folks can get out of debt?

> Are all of these folks more susceptible to bribes and blackmail?

Yes? I expect I’m more susceptible to bribes and blackmail than I would be if I were independently wealthy and mortgage-free.

Not that I want to be discriminated against on those grounds.

Ah, yes, that matters so much when applying for a gas station attendant job.

But please, most people have debt! Mortgages, a car loan, educational debt. Revolving credit card debt, even if they pay off the statement balance every month. (Maybe you personally don't, but you are not typical if that's the case!)

Sure, if you have debts that you are having trouble paying, maybe you'd be more susceptible to accepting a bribe or caving to blackmail? But c'mon, for most jobs out there this is just not a consideration.

That's a weird position to take, considering that one of the foundational concepts of the global financial system is debt. Without debt, our financial system would look very different, and almost certainly not in a good way.

Using debt wisely as an individual is a great way to be able to have and do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to have and do, and it's perfectly possible to manage that responsibly.

In my 20s I had a girlfriend who considered it a negative that I was carrying educational debt. Despite the fact that a) I was easily making my monthly payment and living within my means, and b) taking on that debt allowed me to attend a top-tier university, which ended up opening several doors in my later professional life that likely would not have otherwise been open to me. My life (15+ years later) is immeasurably better for having taken on that debt, which I fully repaid years ago.

Sure, there's such a thing has taking on too much debt, and being unable to service your debt within the financial framework of your income and expenses. But even if that happens, you're most like not a "bad person". Financial literacy and education in many places (especially the US) is not particularly great, so it's no surprise that many people make bad financial decisions.

Every corner of our economy is dependent on debt. Even the wealthy have debt. Almost anyone who starts a business takes on debt.

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