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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   36088 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Uh, why do you have bad credit despite living on your own for years? Not paying your bills is in fact correlated with not paying your bills. It's perfectly reasonable to look at credit history when we have a system which gives tenants substantial protections in the event of not paying.

You can find slumlords who'll rent to you without having credit. You can also build your own credit. You are, based on living on your own for years, not a twenty year old who hasn't had time for that- the consequences of your own bad(or at least nonconformist) decisions including 'difficult to rent an apartment' isn't some kind of tragedy.

It’s completely unreasonable to not have home rental payments on your credit report. It’s a history of paying your largest bill - and it doesn’t exist outside of an eviction. So only negative, but never a positive.

Saying people should rent from slumlords if they don’t have credit yet or bad credit is slightly above barbaric thinking.

You can easily get a credit card and pay it off every month. It's no different from using a debit card except with some additional fraud protections(in practice, you can overdraft your debit)- and if you've been living on your own for years there's been more than enough time to build up credit by doing it.

The world is as it is. I suspect consumer privacy laws are the reason landlords don't report to credit monitoring agencies but it's literally never been easier to build credit. Live with the constraints we're given- a five minute google search of 'how credit scores are calculated' can tell you basically what you need to do.

I have some sympathy for kids who struggle when they're first out on their own because they don't have credit yet- although with the caveat that most of them are fine getting a parent to cosign or renting a room not an apartment. But full-blown-adults who still have bad or no credit, years later? Your problem stems from either a) making bad decisions(this is far more likely, in practice) or b) refusing to be normal(based on what you're telling me, this is probably you). 'Oddballs looking bad in front of the system because it doesn't know how to analyze them' isn't some kind of tragedy.

I do think that paying rent should be reported for credit purposes if not paying rent is. It's not very fair if something can only ever have downside, but no upside. But otherwise I think you're right - it's very easy to build credit, so if one is refusing to take that step they don't merit a lot of sympathy.

I think there is a way to make rent payments reported to credit agencies, it just requires a lot of paperwork and opt-in. My guess is that there’s tenants privacy rights laws that make it this way(probably not on purpose). Probably this process should be made somewhat easier.

If you don’t have any credit history, you have good credit, not bad credit. I have arrived in US with no credit history at all, and at no point my credit score was below 700.

I wonder if it's an age thing. When I returned from overseas as an American citizen in my early 20s, my credit score was ~650 despite me never having had a loan or credit card.

If you have literally no credit, your credit score is supposed to be indeterminable. I would suspect that any scores in this case are the result of errors and are basically random. Or you're mistaken about having no credit.

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