Live data from Hacker News

FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

axios.com

141–150 of 690 posts

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#141

Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less) However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later. At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. i.e., credi…

> Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. I disagree. You use credit to buy a car or buy a house when you don't have the cash to buy them up-front. It's not so you can use them to make money, it's so you can use them to enjoy life . > At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. Only if you go too far. The point is to buy things knowing what they'll c…

This ignores the fundamental equation

    T = kM
where "T" is time, "M" is money, and k is some constant.

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#142

FICO scores are a joke. They hint at what they use to calculate them, but the algorithms are kept secret. Fair Isaac can't reveal the algorithms, otherwise they'd get gamed. Incentives to keep bad info and wrong info in dossiers are strong, too. If allowed, Fair Isaac would put rumors and other bullshit on n your file, and never take it out.

the score is easy to reverse engineer if you have the data and pretty much every big bank has the data.

source: I worked at a big bank and did this, it was easy.

Most of the stuff is obvious and intuitive (don't make late payments). One that's not terribly intuitive is credit line utilization. It has a big impact and most people don't think about it. For example, it's better to have 2k in credit card debt if you have 20k in credit lines vs. 1k in debt on 2k in credit lines.

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#143

Why do some ancient traditions ban usury?

I suspect actually MOST ancient traditions ban usury (or ban lending altogether). Christianity banned usury, Islam banned essentially all lending, Hinduism banned some casts from lending and regulated the lending of others[1].

I think the practice was found to be corrosive to societies and thus at one point or another many of them tried to ban it. (Lending is also very helpful for commerce, so most societies also reintroduced it. Actual practice varied at different points in history.)

1. https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe14/sbe1405.htm

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#144

Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less) However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later. At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. i.e., credi…

> Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. I disagree. You use credit to buy a car or buy a house when you don't have the cash to buy them up-front. It's not so you can use them to make money, it's so you can use them to enjoy life . > At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. Only if you go too far. The point is to buy things knowing what they'll c…

> You use credit to buy a car or buy a house when you don't have the cash to buy them up-front.

Still the same principle - you buy long-term asset that makes rent-equivalent money if you rented that otherwise. That is different than borrowing for immediate consumption.

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#145
post #129

Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less) However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later. At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. i.e., credi…

No, an average person uses it to improve liquidity atop overall solid fundamentals. Literally hundreds of million people worldwide do it with no adverse effects and improved quality of life. Irresponsible people are relatively a minority (although they tend to make the news). And aversion to financing is in itself a poverty marker more often than not.

Of those who carry credit cards in the US, 60% of them carry a balance [0].

There are also all those reports that have come out about how nearly 40% of Americans don't have $400 for an emergency [1], with the median being just $600.

If the rule of thumb for an emergency fund is 3-6 months of expenses, and we can agree that paying interest on a credit card is a bad finical decision, then I'm not sure how the "average" person has solid fundamentals, where credit cards are being used as a strategic tool.

People also tend to spend more when using credit cards [2], which negates most benefits someone may get from using credit card for the points. So even those with solid fundamentals, who are using it as a tool, are probably still losing, just in a less obvious way.

[0] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/03/why-ar...

[1] https://www.empower.com/press-center/37-americans-cant-affor...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008196717017

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#146

Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less) However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later. At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. i.e., credi…

For the average consumer, debt is selling its future self as slave.

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#147
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the average person is using The "average person" is told from birth to consume as many things and experiences as possible as it if was the only thing that could give their life a meaning. The entire system is based on growth and consumption, I have a hard time blaming "the average person"

I acknowledge that such telling exists, but there is still responsibility for people choosing to listen to it. Skepticism is vital. Beyond being skeptical of what you see, it is wild to me that we don't have approximately everyone blocking all ads, cable news, most social feeds, and other such transparently manipulative shit. Advertisement especially is literally industrialized and research-based psychological manipu…

[dead]

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#148
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. I disagree. You use credit to buy a car or buy a house when you don't have the cash to buy them up-front. It's not so you can use them to make money, it's so you can use them to enjoy life . > At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses. Only if you go too far. The point is to buy things knowing what they'll c…

> They're a tool to be used responsibly. I used to hate to take the position that government should save people from themselves, but I've moderated a lot on it. Some people clearly cannot use credit responsibly.

Societies used to understand this and put lots of limits around exploiting people, such as banning interest rates. But there is no unalloyed good. That ban also blocked rapid economic development as seen in the 19th century, where credit was absolutely critical for railroad construction and other infrastructure like electric or plumbing.

It's a real dilemma with tradeoffs, where slogans and soundbites don't work. Having opportunity means you may squander it. Too many guardrails on life paths and behavior blocks meritocratic social mobility as well as opportunities and motivation.

Since conditions are changing too fast there is no appropriate crystallized wisdom about it. There is no wealth of myths that would define how to live. The best we are able to say is the non-instruction to "be free" and to tap into your authentic self and author your life path with freedom and agency.

In biology one can distinguish evolved traits and behaviors (instincts) from learned ones. The latter can adapt much faster to the situation. Even better than learning from environmental feedback over one's lifetime is planning and simulating possible futures and deciding based on that. Somewhere between the individual lifetime and the genetic evolution levels, there is also the level of culture that used to reshape much slower than a single lifetime, taking lessons and condensing them over generations into templates. But more amd more as we diverge from the ancestral environmental conditions of the savannah and hunting-gathering in tight knit tribes and clans, we can less and less rely on biological instinct, cultural bedrock, wisdom from the parents' generation, what you learned a decade ago, and so on. We are forced to adapt and outmaneuver the shifting landscape faster than ever. More and more things pulling in entirely opposite directions. A vortex of stimuli to cut through with a machete-like mental strength. But most people are not built for this, and even those who are, constantly have to gamble and guess and rely on luck and hindsight.

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#149
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also think that way about buying a house with a mortgage (credit)? I don't. A mortgage isn't used to make more money. It's used so people can own a house after saving for a few years, rather than waiting until they've saved for a few decades.

I do. Housing prices are constantly rising, when you take a loan you are buying an asset which (with some luck) may appreciate in value more than mortgage interest rates. That's why in some countries it's worth taking a loan as soon as possible without saving for too long. Sure, without mortgage you may not be able to afford a house at all but it does not change the fact that mortgage is a "good" loan (i.e. you benef…

Mortgages with low interest rates are also one of the (main) reasons houses are so "expensive" in the first place.

The cheaper money (credit) is, the "higher" the prices will go.

It's not so much that houses became expensive, it's more that money to buy a house (specifically mortgages) became relatively cheaper. Low interest rates did that.

Re: FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using credit to buy a car, most people do so in order to get to and from their place of work for the majority of their driving time. In that way, using credit to buy a car still fits into their theoretical model. For example I know plenty of people who completely got rid of their cars when remote work became more common, or at the very least consolidated to smaller cars or to less cars for a family. Similar…

No. You can rent and you can take the bus. Or rent and buy a crazy cheap old used car. A house and a decent car are not primarily about making money. They're about your quality of life. > And all recommend not using credit cards and instead an emergency fund if you lose your job. And if you already used your emergency fund on, say, a medical emergency...?

8 years ago I bought a house. My monthly rent was 1300 and mortgage/escrow/repair savings were instead 2000. Rent went up $100-$200 a year.

My son is looking for rentals in our same community and the equivalent rental to what I had is now around $3000.

Even ignoring appreciation, in the long term there was a cash flow savings.

Post reply on HN