Credit is a cruel mistress

The whole credit industry defies any logical sense. There are so many things wrong with it that I don’t even know where to begin. Firstly let’s start with how credit bureaus are allowed to tabulate and sell your credit report, but they charge you to see the information that consists of your most personal details. I had some inaccuracies in my credit report, and it gives you the option to say “this is wrong” and they’ll remove it, but they don’t give you the opportunity to actually correct it. Next, is the predatory lending practices, they want you to get into debt, which according to their scoring system you have to do over and over again if you ever want to be able to buy a house. Their scoring system punishes you for being so solvent you don’t have to use debt. You could make $200k a year, never be late on a bill, pay for your car with cash and they will decide you are “high risk”, whereas someone who needs to use debt repeatedly to afford their lifestyle gets rewarded. I have a $7000 limit on my credit card, which is more than ample. However my score is calculated by judging my debt-to-credit ratio. Since I have $4000 on my statement this month my score is penalized for using more than 50% of my available debt even though I will pay it totally off when my bill is due. The only way to avoid this negative mark, was to request them to double my line of credit which they happily obliged, of course. So even though I will likely never charge $14,000 in a given month it brings my debt-to-credit ratio under 30% which is more desirable on my credit report. It is a tricky, tricky game.