61–70 of 190 posts
I've worked on the data feeds for TWN in a large company's payroll system. If I remember right they don't just get how much money you made but the line by line check level data. Your pay data probably goes out to 14 different vendors on any given pay period. What amaze me about payroll was how accurate the data was on average, despite having wild amounts of new regulatory, healthcare, union, and pay program complexit…
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In general, your score would immediately go down as your credit utilization would go up (outstanding balance over total available credit).
0/infinity is still zero
A cogent argument could.be made that transunion, Equifax, and other big private credit clearinghouses act as direct agents of an unspoken american "social credit" system in which the credit score denies housing and employment to those who refuse to or cannot conform to a largely invisible tome of rules. These agents are then unpoliced as they serve capitalisms direct need for an underclass. Full disclosure: I am a co…
I see where you're coming from, but on the other hand, the biggest rules are well known and quite simple: If you take a loan and pay it back on time, you'll have high credit. If you fail to meet your obligations, you won't. The existence of an underclass which is constantly on the edge of not being able to pay their bills is true though.
I did not get a credit card. I did not have any loans, for school or anything else.
My credit score wasn't even a number, it just didn't exist. Even the bank I banked with, which could see that I had more than $8k USD deposited monthly, that could see I had $30k in an account with them, would not give me a loan to buy a car.
Even if I were to get a credit card and pay it back on time, my credit score would be quite low due to having no history, and I still could not get a loan.
I'm fortunate that the apartments I have rented so far have not done credit checks, only background checks and looked at salaries / offer letters, but there are many apartments I simply could not rent since I would obviously fail their credit check, despite never having had any debt.
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I see where you're coming from, but on the other hand, the biggest rules are well known and quite simple: If you take a loan and pay it back on time, you'll have high credit. If you fail to meet your obligations, you won't. The existence of an underclass which is constantly on the edge of not being able to pay their bills is true though.
My credit is tanked from an ex opening up accounts in my name and running up the tab while I was being treated for leukaemia and Crohns. Six years later and I’m still fixing the damage.
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If “paying you debts” is an “invisible tome of rules” then I’m all for it. Let’s be honest, credit score pretty accurately reflect what they are supposed to measure - credit worthiness.
> credit score pretty accurately reflect what they are supposed to measure - credit worthiness Do they? If that was true, how could we verify it, beyond an initial gut feeling? There is no published rule book or methodology for credit score calculations!
Presumably these lenders find these scores accurate enough to prevent enough bad loans while not turning away too many credit worthy customers.
That said, obviously the models can be improved with more data. I worked for a lender for a while whose edge was giving people a slightly lower rate (or lending to some folks that just missed the cutoff with other lenders) because we thought our model was a bit more accurate than the credit scores / models used by other lenders.
But even we admitted to ourselves that these were just marginal improvements, by and large the credit score is a super meaningful indicator.
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> credit score pretty accurately reflect what they are supposed to measure - credit worthiness Do they? If that was true, how could we verify it, beyond an initial gut feeling? There is no published rule book or methodology for credit score calculations!
I get what you are saying but you are not the customer. The customers are lenders which rely on these scores to make lending decisions critical to their business. Presumably these lenders find these scores accurate enough to prevent enough bad loans while not turning away too many credit worthy customers. That said, obviously the models can be improved with more data. I worked for a lender for a while whose edge was…
And this is precisely the point. If there was an error in your score, you'd have no way of knowing, no reasonable basis for any appeal, and it just sucks to be you. Lenders don't care if individual scores are accurate, they only care about whether they're making more money than they're losing.
It's analogous to doing AI gender prediction: it works fine in the aggregate, but you run into issues at the individual level, and it's the individual's rights that I care about.
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Have you thought about publishing your tactics in gaming the credit system?
There are already tons of articles and videos that have already been published on this. And now Experian / other bureaus offer score breakdowns along with calculators where you can explore how hypothetical actions would affect your score. I think the space is pretty well covered:) (For an example, Google for AskSebby - How to Increase Your Credit Score)
Google Search: AskSebby - How to Increase Your Credit Score
First AskSebby result. https://www.asksebby.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-credit-sco...
I'll keep digging.
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I get what you are saying but you are not the customer. The customers are lenders which rely on these scores to make lending decisions critical to their business. Presumably these lenders find these scores accurate enough to prevent enough bad loans while not turning away too many credit worthy customers. That said, obviously the models can be improved with more data. I worked for a lender for a while whose edge was…
> Presumably these lenders find these scores accurate enough to prevent enough bad loans while not turning away too many credit worthy customers. And this is precisely the point. If there was an error in your score, you'd have no way of knowing, no reasonable basis for any appeal, and it just sucks to be you. Lenders don't care if individual scores are accurate, they only care about whether they're making more money…
I don't think that's true. I remember many years ago getting a free credit report on myself (it may have been a free trial from a monitoring service but I believe you can also just get it from the agencies itself)
You get to see the data that is factored into your score. Anything that majorly dings your credit should be obvious (eg Experian thinks you are delinquent on something that is actually paid off)
I never had to deal with that but likely the error then is with the reporting bank so you call them to fix the issue.
Is there a reason you think this isn't possible?
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> Presumably these lenders find these scores accurate enough to prevent enough bad loans while not turning away too many credit worthy customers. And this is precisely the point. If there was an error in your score, you'd have no way of knowing, no reasonable basis for any appeal, and it just sucks to be you. Lenders don't care if individual scores are accurate, they only care about whether they're making more money…
// If there was an error in your score, you'd have no way of knowin I don't think that's true. I remember many years ago getting a free credit report on myself (it may have been a free trial from a monitoring service but I believe you can also just get it from the agencies itself) You get to see the data that is factored into your score. Anything that majorly dings your credit should be obvious (eg Experian thinks yo…
> Is there a reason you think this isn't possible?
The methodology for the calculation of credit scores is secret. You can't go on the internet and figure out how they do it. They don't tell you, they don't publish it, you can't know. Therefore you don't have the ability to check their work.
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Even in our most dystopian RAND-suggested bedtime story vision of a "communist hellhole", those proles who happened to possess a ruble when they got to the front of the breadline could buy a loaf. In the supercapitalist future, all transactions will require the approval of more than the two involved parties. Good luck buying anything if you ever express skepticism toward the great and powerful credit bureaus.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something about the point you're making, but in 2023 the third party creditor already must approve any transactions where credit is extended (e.g. credit card) Credit bureaus remain uninvolved with cash transactions since, er, well, there's no creditor to be concerned about creditworthiness? I don't see how "supercapitalism" changes that