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Comment by joelmbell | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree. We all obsess about the FICO score way too much. If you plan on living mostly debt free then usually you don't even have a need for a credit score. There are ways to get mortgages if you want one even if you don't have a credit history.

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I was about the age of the original poster, and had lived debt-free, credit-card-free thus far, when I went to buy a mobile phone. The listed price was $100, but because I had such a low credit score, they were going to charge me a $500 deposit fee to buy the $100 phone.

It's totally possible to live without debt, but it seems curiously inconvenient to live without a good credit score.

Just to clarify, you were almost certainly not buying a $100 phone, but a $600 phone and two year contract with only $100 upfront.

You can easily buy an unlocked phone for full price, and use it on a prepaid service with no credit check.

It's been some years, so I don't recall exactly, but this is probably correct. Nevertheless, the point remains: my inadequate credit score mucked with my options here.

Your inadequate credit score prevented you from being able to get a form of debt. Nobody is arguing thats not true.

And yes, cell phone subsidies are a form of debt because you are paying back the price of the phone built into the 2 year contract. If you buy the phone upfront then you can go month to month without needing to be tied into a contract.

So my point is consistent, if you plan on living debt free, the FICO score is being given way to much attention.

This all makes sense. Regrettably, the Verizon salesman did not explain it to me this way, and presented it as a penalty due to my low credit score. It seemed believable, too, because it wasn't that interesting of a phone. This was in circa 2002; $100 seemed like a decent price for the phone I was trying to buy -- $600 did not.

Oh well. Thanks for your comment!

> There are ways to get mortgages if you want one even if you don't have a credit history.

I've never heard of this. Even if its possible, You will most likely pay a huge premium, if you want a lender to not use FICO scores to determine how risky of a client they're about to lend money to.

You'd think that someone who had regularly saved large chunks of their pay for years, and never got in any debt, would be a pretty safe person to give a mortgage to! Perhaps there's a gap in the market there. Or perhaps there aren't enough people like that to make it worthwhile? :)

Wow, I guess my last post was unpopular here. Look into "Manual Underwriting" its definitely possible to get a mortgage without a FICO store.

My problem withe the FICO score is that it is not an indicator of financial stability. Its entirely based off of debt. If someone wants to live debt free, which most would argue is a great position to be in financially, you're actually punished by FICO. The system is broken, and everyones obsession with the FICO score just feeds that broken system.

If more people did things like Manual Underwriting, and tried to live debt free I think it would drastically help the entire system.

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