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The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

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Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can open a secured credit card, never use it and after a year convert it to an unsecured credit card, getting your deposit back. And you would never have been in debt.

That's not quite accurate, almost any secured or subprime credit card will have activity requirements. Most will close your account if there's insufficient transactions in the last three months.

Even if they close the account it still "counts" on your credit score for 10 years.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#292
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have about $150k limit on my cards combined. It would be a lot higher but I asked most of them to lower my limits. I just have a lot of cards. If they want to give me bonuses for signing up I will take them. Free money.

Don't you have to pay annual fees?

Total it would be like $300, but all of them are "first year free".

Plus usually you can call and get the second year free too.

Regardless, I can cancel w.e. and the increase in my credit score is worth it. At the moment if I want to buy a house (for example) I get the best rates on loans

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted because you are spouting falsehoods about the US credit/financial system.

Which falsehood exactly?

Where to start?

> You are american you have a history and your parents have a history.

Parents have nothing to do with anything unless your parents cosign or add you as an authorized user on their cards. Being American has nothing to do with anything other than some cards require you to be a US citizen for some reason, my BVAA card does for example. My parents are scumbags and their scummy-iness doesn't effect my ability to build credit.

The trick is to apply for the right card, different lenders/products target different populations. A store card or a secured card is a good start in building credit, that's what I did when I was young and had practically zero income. My limit was like $300 but it was enough to get me on the map. I didn't have to deal with being rejected because I applied for the product that fits my life situation. If you just apply for the heavily advertised cards you are not going to get a good result. After that I applied for a crappy card I was "pre-approved" for that came in the mail. Once you have a credit history you're going to get offers in the mail unless you opt-out.

Getting a charge card (which is not the same as a credit card) may be an option too, not sure on that one.

>The question is not about your credit score but about getting the credit card to begin with. Once you get the card they assign you a credit score but in order to get it you have to start building debt (and as a foreigner I had to do that with my own money)

False, you don't have to have any debt to get a credit score. Having credit available to you you don't use is enough.

First you say

>You are asked about assets, income etc. but those things have very little effect on whether you get a credit card or not.

Then you say:

>I wasn't talking about credit history but about history as in, a customer in a bank for years. These are also factors for how easy/hard things like this is.... There is a difference between being a US citizen having had bank account most of your life and then being a foreigner who just got yours.

Those things are mutually exclusive and both can't be correct.

>There are plenty of other ways to credit companies could gauge inside your economic maturity as much of your financial history have been done via debit card for more or less the same transactions that you are going to use your credit card for... You are not suddenly going to become financially irresponsible just because you get credit

This is beyond false and laughable. Nobody gives two craps about "economic maturity" they want to know "is this person likely to pay back the loan?"

>Second it's a fairly know issue that the way creditscore is established is pretty flawed.

It has its limits but are you questioning actuaries that crunch these numbers for a living? I mean, I'm assuming they have a reason and numbers and there's data to back it up and they just didn't say "lol, lets make up some shit." If they were getting bad results and losing money they'd change the algorithm.

> I live in the US so yes I have a pretty good idea of how it works.

Almost no Americans have any idea how "the system" works, its very specificity knowledge and there's tons of myths. You know how many times I've heard people say "my credit is terrible, its around 750?" 750 is an excellent score. People get credit reports confused with credit scores and all kinds of "I heard," "I assume," etc.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#294
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you have to pay annual fees?

Total it would be like $300, but all of them are "first year free". Plus usually you can call and get the second year free too. Regardless, I can cancel w.e. and the increase in my credit score is worth it. At the moment if I want to buy a house (for example) I get the best rates on loans

Many cards are first year free but quite a few aren't. AMEX stopped first year free on a lot of their cards. Regardless if I'm getting a bonus I'm subtracting any fees from that bonus to see if it makes sense. If a card is $100 annual fee and the worth of the first year is $500 it's a no brainier to get $400.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get any store credit card easily. Your limit will be like $400 but it's enough to get you a history.

As a Canadian expat, my experience was nearly identical to FireBeyond's upon moving to the US. As you suggest, I was able to get a store credit card, then it was over a year (during which I never used the store card at all) before I was even considered for a regular credit card. If that's not symptomatic of a broken process, I'm not sure what is...

I honestly don't think it's broken. If I'm going to loan you money it makes sense that I'd like you to have a history of successfully managing debt and access to debt. You are more risky if you don't have a history.

It makes logical sense. Is it fair? I don't really think so, but its at least logical.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accurately predicting your likelihood of default is worth a ton of money. If every company makes bad assumptions like you describe, then a new company could make a ton of money by correcting those bad assumptions and giving out loans to people who can't get them otherwise. That doesn't mean that systematic failures can't happen, but they're pretty unlikely. It's much more likely that you underestimate the correlation…

> then a new company could make a ton of money by correcting those bad assumptions and giving out loans to people who can't get them otherwise. This quite literally happens already.

That's pretty much my whole point. New companies regularly step in and take advantage of competitors' biases, so anything that looks like a long-term systematic bias probably is actually a reflection of a real correlation instead, because if it was a real bias, somebody probably would have stepped in and taken advantage by now.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every State in the US has ID cards, but citizens aren't required to obtain one at any point. (Although a heck of a lot of basic things-- driving a car on a public road, boarding an airplane, buying alcohol-- are gated by them.) What we don't have is a Federal ID card. The TSA tried to impose one, but a lot of States are pushing back against it. (Washington State called the TSA's bluff and obtained a 2-year "extension…

> The SSN was never intended to be ID... Wasn't that basically BS from the beginning though? What other purpose would it serve?

It identifies a social security account, not a human being.

Just like your bank has a number that describes your bank account. It doesn't describe you, but an account you own/control.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian expat, my experience was nearly identical to FireBeyond's upon moving to the US. As you suggest, I was able to get a store credit card, then it was over a year (during which I never used the store card at all) before I was even considered for a regular credit card. If that's not symptomatic of a broken process, I'm not sure what is...

I honestly don't think it's broken. If I'm going to loan you money it makes sense that I'd like you to have a history of successfully managing debt and access to debt. You are more risky if you don't have a history. It makes logical sense. Is it fair? I don't really think so, but its at least logical.

Yet other countries have no issue doing it differently.

So there are other ways than the US one.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absurdly backwards because it's asking you to create debt which normally is the opposite of showing you are good with money and I would question the validity of seeing people paying back limited debt to be indicative of ex. borrowing for a house. You could instead just look at the history of their debit card usage to figure out whether they are trustworthy. As I said though I understand why they do it, it's just…

The trust by default model was tried with driver's licenses. Give one to everybody. Result: lots of accidents. Most states have now switched policies and require a year of driving with a provisional license. Result: fewer accidents. If we want to avoid debt "accidents", only letting people with demonstrated experience seems like a good solution.

It turns out that age matters a hell of a lot, independent even of experience. Teenagers are horrific insurance risks.

A provisional license offers both supervised training and effectively delays entry into the unsupervised insurance pool by a year.

After this, location (e.g., ZIP Code, in the US) and miles driven are the biggest predictors. Latter are why insurance companies will do almost anything to get ahold of odometer readings.

Source: Worked on auto insurance risk products.

Re: The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

#300

The US is as far as I know the only country in the world who have a positive creditscore system. At least in Europe it's mostly based on a negative creditscore i.e. you are trusted by definition but if you don't pay your bills you end up not being allowed access to credit. In the US they don't trust you per definition and instead you have to prove that you are good with money by basically creating debt and then payin…

> In the US they don't trust you per definition and instead you have to prove that you are good with money by basically creating debt and then paying it off.

You have to do the same to get a mortgage in UK. And that's why I need a credit card

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