As your own score?
Don’t ever take a job where you have to run people’s credit. I used to buy dinner every time my buddy that worked F&I pulled a score starting with a 4xx
America is filled of sloppy 5xx and 6xx scores: six figure salaries who just don’t pay on time.
Yes. Lol. 
I can only imagine. 
I’ve said a thousand times before, and I’ll likely say it a thousand additional times. Financial success is not solely contingent on having a hefty income, though it seems the average Joe believes otherwise.
Also seven, eight, etc figures.
The crazy thing is how easy it is to just set your accounts for automatic minimum payments now. Back in the day when it was mailing checks and paper bills, it’s no surprise that you might forget or miss a month. But now? the only excuse is you made a bad decision overextending yourself and not having enough savings to pay your bills.
Some banks (and utilities) make it annoying for you to change your auto pay, where it only gets applied to the following cycle. You have to remember to do a manual one-time payment for the cycle you just canceled to update the new amount/account.
Also score is one part of the drama.
For bad credit, you need to look at when your most recent bad remark happened - e.g. was your late payment 2 months old, 2 years old or 5? Recent bankruptcy, reposition, charge-off, etc.
Lower scores can also be heavily weighed down by utilization. Moving them to a personal loan can do wonders for the score. Bumped mine up by over 100 points by just doing this. Not only does it help you pay things faster with a lower rate but it also helps unlock plenty of credit limit increases & better rates.
I aspire to be below 600 someday…very close to not requiring credit at all. This should be everyone’s goal.
Let me add some punctuation.
This was to answer someone asking if no credit history would give them a 600.
People with Zero Credit history can have nice numbers like an 850. But that doesn’t mean they get the best rates as score is not the only metric credit companies use.
Having great credit and being in perpetual debt are dramatically different things.
I did not know this was possible.
It isn’t. It takes aged accounts to get that high.
And FICO won’t even generate a score unless you have one account that’s six months old.
Credit is only a measure of how good you are with retaining some form of debt and covering those debt balances. As you remove debt your score decreases so over and 800 just means they got you right where they want you.
My father who had zero cars, no mortgage, no credit cards had an 840. To this day I do not know how. Maybe because of his past?
This thread…
Light mode just burned my eyeballs. Dark mode FTW
There are some fundamental misunderstandings in your analysis.
For one thing, with credit cards the lower the balances relative to your credit limits, the better your scores will be.
High utilization of your existing revolving credit lines is a score killer.
Also, having an installment trade line (car, mortgage) reporting with a low balance relative to the original loan amount is better for your score than a new loan where you owe at/close to 100% of the original balance.
So it works basically the opposite of what you described.
Of course, you can have perfect scores with no installment loans at all and only credit cards that you pay in full every month, thereby avoiding any interest costs…
Plus using those credit cards will get you cashback or travel rewards instead of receiving nothing from a shitty debit card for exactly the same spending.
If you’re doing it right, they pay you. It’s really your choice.
@JD81 This is the debt that’s underneath the 850 Experian FICO 8 I posted recently.
The car loan balance is driving me insane, but liquid savings is paying 2%, so it really isn’t costing me anything.
This is what I do.
Same since 2005, little has changed since I said this — in this thread — back in Jan 2020
I think my lowest cashback year so far has been ~$800, and that doesn’t include the cashback on the business credit cards or the freebies (e.g, Amazon Prime membership, Trusted Traveler Renewal). If a cc doesn’t pay me in cash money or a short list of travel duckets I prefer like Marriot/Hilton points, it’s skeeball tickets I’m not interested in collecting. But my goal is to turn over (redeem, swap, gift, donate) any points I accrue within ~12 months.
