Info dumping about credit because my parents didn’t teach me any of this shit and I spent years watching my peers get shit more or less for free while I struggled because generational poverty sucks ass.
There are 3 main bureaus and 2 smaller bureaus who all gather credit-related data on you. All of them are private institutions. That data is separate from their credit scores, which are all calculated with separate proprietary formulas. Many lenders, rather than pay to use the proprietary formula, will create their own formulas which they can plug data they receive from any combination of the bureaus into. And sometimes they will pull from additional sources like background checks.
What you can do is target the different categories of data, which are weighted the same in all the averages (or at least similar in most of them, idk). Utilization rate and credit diversity are weighted the most iirc.
There’s a lot of stuff you can do to boost a credit score arbitrarily. Age of credit is huge. My kid turns 13 soon and I’ve been saving up to get them a $500 secured credit card (so I give the bank $500 and they’ll give my kid a credit card with a $500 limit). They wanna put a couple twitch subscriptions on it and pay it off every month, which is doable. Then we basically put the card in a box and put it up and out of sight. Around the time they start driving we’ll try and find a car with a manageable payment and put it in their name. With how the car market has been lately, finding a beater in a private sale is increasingly difficult and they’ve gotta get to work, so this is the way to go anyway.
By the time they’re 21, they’ll have made the same choices I did (put some bullshit hobby stuff on a credit card you probably shouldn’t have and buy an overpriced car on payment), but instead of 2 repossessions and a long list of blocked debt collectors, they could feasibly have an 800+ credit score. And it won’t even take a lot of extra effort on my part. Saving $500 sucked, but it’ll just be a single afternoon of my time and a few extra prompts to make sure their ADHD ass isn’t getting behind on payments. That’s really all I needed but I had to learn all my ADHD strategies on my own. How my parents functioned for 70 years with severe unmedicated ADHD and no alarm or list system is beyond me. I guess the answer is a mix of alcoholism and “they didn’t”
Info dumping about credit because my parents didn’t teach me any of this shit and I spent years watching my peers get shit more or less for free while I struggled because generational poverty sucks ass.
There are 3 main bureaus and 2 smaller bureaus who all gather credit-related data on you. All of them are private institutions. That data is separate from their credit scores, which are all calculated with separate proprietary formulas. Many lenders, rather than pay to use the proprietary formula, will create their own formulas which they can plug data they receive from any combination of the bureaus into. And sometimes they will pull from additional sources like background checks.
What you can do is target the different categories of data, which are weighted the same in all the averages (or at least similar in most of them, idk). Utilization rate and credit diversity are weighted the most iirc.
There’s a lot of stuff you can do to boost a credit score arbitrarily. Age of credit is huge. My kid turns 13 soon and I’ve been saving up to get them a $500 secured credit card (so I give the bank $500 and they’ll give my kid a credit card with a $500 limit). They wanna put a couple twitch subscriptions on it and pay it off every month, which is doable. Then we basically put the card in a box and put it up and out of sight. Around the time they start driving we’ll try and find a car with a manageable payment and put it in their name. With how the car market has been lately, finding a beater in a private sale is increasingly difficult and they’ve gotta get to work, so this is the way to go anyway.
By the time they’re 21, they’ll have made the same choices I did (put some bullshit hobby stuff on a credit card you probably shouldn’t have and buy an overpriced car on payment), but instead of 2 repossessions and a long list of blocked debt collectors, they could feasibly have an 800+ credit score. And it won’t even take a lot of extra effort on my part. Saving $500 sucked, but it’ll just be a single afternoon of my time and a few extra prompts to make sure their ADHD ass isn’t getting behind on payments. That’s really all I needed but I had to learn all my ADHD strategies on my own. How my parents functioned for 70 years with severe unmedicated ADHD and no alarm or list system is beyond me. I guess the answer is a mix of alcoholism and “they didn’t”