Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 690 posts

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

#411

Post by crazygringo »

bluGill wrote: post #379
crazygringo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...?

The odds of two emergencies are low enough that you can ignore this. Not that it doesn't happen, but it isn't that common. If you expect two emergencies you should have more in the fund to cover it.

> If you expect two emergencies

Emergencies are unexpected.

And a lot of people simply don't have the money to build up that kind of fund. To suggest that they "should" is to be pretty out-of-touch with the realities of a lot of people. Sometimes they need to rely on credit, because there aren't any alternatives. So that credit becomes a lifeline, a good thing.

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

#412

Post by lxgr »

9rx wrote: post #396
lxgr wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of Java 18, it is: https://openjdk.org/jeps/400

That's not what your link says: The Java language allows source code to express Unicode characters in a UTF-16 encoding, and this is unaffected by the choice of UTF-8 for the default charset. Perhaps you pasted the wrong one by mistake? Not that such a change to the language for future code, even if only hypothetical, would bear any difference to this discussion anyway as legacy Java code encoded in other charsets is…

Just one sentence after the one you quoted:

> However, the javac compiler is affected because it assumes that .java source files are encoded with the default charset, unless configured otherwise by the -encoding option.

Interestingly, in Windows, Java programs were supposedly encoded in CP-1252 before this...?

> In JDK 17 and earlier, the default charset is determined when the Java runtime starts. On macOS, it is UTF-8 except in the POSIX C locale. On other operating systems, it depends upon the user's locale and the default encoding, e.g., on Windows, it is a codepage-based charset such as windows-1252 or windows-31j.

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

#413

Post by phil21 »

ta1243 wrote: post #297
lesuorac wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd have to invest the savings and get way higher than inflation returns to break even. You say that like it's a difficult thing to do. S&P500 is up 710% since 1996. Gold is up 92% since 2012. Personally, the rent control is the best part of a mortgage and even though renting is typically better, I'm fine paying a premium for that. That said, good luck getting somebody to loan you 900k so you can play the stock m…

> Gold is up 92% since 2012. And housing is up 125% since 2012, so the sucker who bought gold instead of a house has lost out. We can all be rich in hindsight. (There's also other benefits to owning - like being able to have pets, not being able to be evicted, etc) But the biggest tell that housing is valuable is that nobody is spending $500k on housing to rent it out if they could make more money pumping $500k into…

> But the biggest tell that housing is valuable is that nobody is spending $500k on housing to rent it out if they could make more money pumping $500k into the stock market.

Of course they are. I do. I do so knowing full well that my expected returns are going to be nowhere near my brokerage account invested in public equities. The past decade has followed that expectation.

I and many others do it as a form of diversification. It’s risk aversion in the end. Most people with capital don’t want to be putting all their eggs into one basket, so for wealth preservation and diversified income streams it’s a good option even knowing up front you are expected to lose money via opportunity cost.

That ignores other benefits of housing being a privileged investment category by the current government and monetary/tax policy. If you seek cheap leverage this is probably one of your few options as a “two bit” player in the market at that $500k level.

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

#414

Post by Ancapistani »

wildzzz wrote: post #207
dh2022 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a consumer that does not pay the balance each month…

CC gives me 30 days to pay it back interest free. BNPL gives me 2, 3, 6, or more months with very little or even no interest. If I know I'm not going to be able to pay it off in a month, I'd rather do a BNPL loan since it's so cheap. Additionally, you can have awful or no credit and still be approved for BNPL. It may be beneficial to have some repaid loans on your credit if you ruined your credit earlier in life like…

I’ll add that I’ve found that the more you use Affirm at least, the better my options get.

I started by always choosing the shortest “plan”, which was 0% and no fees. After I’d paid off a few of those, I started getting offered plans of up to a year with no interest and very minimal fees.

Now, while I don’t use Affirm for luxury/unnecessary purchases, it offers better rates than any credit card I have, and better than a bank loan in many cases.

I have three Affirm loans right now, for a total of about $8k. All three of those are business expenses, and all three have increased profit in our business significantly more than they cost us.

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

#415

Post by FireBeyond »

ch4s3 wrote: post #333
parpfish wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because that’s what a scores is designed to do it doesn’t mean that’s what businesses use it for downstream. The fact people always debate what a credit score really means suggests that there are too many factors rolled up into a single number when we should really have a few distinct sub-scales. Anybody that has made a dashboard for a ceo with a short attention span that refuses to deal with nuance and just wan…

I agree in general, but a credit score absolutely DOES NOT tell you how profitable someone is to lend to, and in general someone with a very high credit score is a very low margin customer.

A score alone does not directly do so. But there is a report attached that will track balances and such. While balance tracking has no "history" in a credit report, lenders can make actuarial guesses based on DTI and other markers which are absolutely included. Which is why, when denied, you don't just get told "Your score is too low" but things like "existing balances are too high", "age of existing accounts is too new", etc.

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

#416

Post by WalterBright »

lm28469 wrote: post #91
PostOnce wrote: post #13

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…

> 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 have a hard time blaming "the average person"

People still have agency and so are responsible for their decisions.

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

#417

Post by Ancapistani »

firesteelrain wrote: post #48
UltraSane wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If customers make every payment their score should improve.

Not if it shows a bunch of Affirm loans. You could look overleveraged for say getting a mortgage

Mortgages have always required you to disclose any BNPL plans to my knowledge.

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

#418

Post by mrguyorama »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #293
lupusreal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol what bus?

My daughter went a year to and from work by bus in Omaha. Yeah, it sucked. But we should instead be trying to fix that rather than just tell people "Let them eat credit."

Fixing takes time. I need to get to work today or else I'm fired and homeless in a few weeks.

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

#419

Post by 9rx »

acuozzo wrote: post #410
9rx wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but why would anyone want to live on what is effectively a farm, but without the benefit of separation from other people or land (read: income) that a farm offers? That completely defies the whole reason for the density. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I question why people are doing it.

FWIW, I grew up in Brooklyn, NY. I know about both urban and suburban living. I now live in Columbia, MD: a suburb from the late '60s planned with high ideals. My three children each have their own room. They can ride their bicycles on our sleepy street without having to constantly worry about reckless drivers. They can explore the walking trails and wooded areas our community maintains. They can play baseball in one…

The benefits of living in the country are obvious. And since the land provides income itself, the extra cost of transportation one has to assume to live in the country is well offset anyway.

Its the weird middle ground that has all of the downsides of the country and all of the downsides of the city all packed into one that we're talking about.

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

#420

Post by vel0city »

9rx wrote: post #377
smelendez wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most American urban areas are dominated by suburbs where it’s not practical to walk everywhere and public transit is very limited. So a car is necessary and often a car per working adult.

Yes, but why would anyone want to live on what is effectively a farm, but without the benefit of separation from other people or land (read: income) that a farm offers? That completely defies the whole reason for the density. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I question why people are doing it.

> The whole reason for accepting being squeezed in tightly with other people

That's the thing, a lot of Americans really don't like this idea of being squeezed in tightly. People really don't like having a shared wall. And it's not that people like these tightly squeezed lot lines, they'd prefer 1 acre lots. These tiny lots are all they can afford while still being somewhat acceptable to them about commutes. Which Americans seem to really just not care about commute times when comparing to tradeoffs on house size and not having shared walls.

And in the end, you can only buy what the cities and towns allow to have built. Which is chosen by those who live there at the time. The cities then make single family structures a requirement, have minimum setbacks and lot sizes, have rigid separations between residential and commercial spaces, etc. So even those people who would want to own an apartment over a commercial suite in what you'd consider an urban area can't make that choice because that choice is illegal.

But people act like these zoning laws just come about on their own. The thing is, these zoning laws are popular. They get put into place because that's what the people who actually vote in local elections push for. I've seen proposal after proposal in cities around me to change zoning to allow density even in limited areas get fought tooth and nail by residents. I remember a project nearby where there was a proposal to build a mixture of 2-3 unit townhouses, some single-family narrow lots, and a tiny spot of commercial for like a coffee shop on land that was currently zoned industrial. All of this connected to the bike network, a large city park and a nature preserve nearby, and good transit connection at the end of the neighborhood. The neighborhoods around fought it tooth and nail and eventually the builder walked away after trying to negotiate for a few years. Well, the land was already zoned industrial, construction broke ground months later to build warehouses. Now instead of a nice neighborhood on my bike path there's warehouses with semi-trucks rolling through all day long. Good job, NIMBYs!

Post reply on HN