For years I've known that I had a high credit card score, but I would like to know what it is exactly. Every time I see an online ad saying "Click Here and See Your Credit Card Score", I click and a screen pops up asking me to give my Account Number and Password. WHAT? I have no such account! Hal View attachment 44565
First, your attachment "cannot be found." Regarding your credit score: your bank should be able to help you with this. As you likely know, you have the right to get your scores from each of the 3 major agencies. You also might check your hard-copy credit card bill (or your online account) for your score, but getting your bank's help is the easiest (and safest) thing to do. My credit score is on my home page of my online bank account. I also get it through Capital One, even though I cancelled my last Crap One card a long time ago...I kept the log-in for that page and it still works & updates. TransUnion updates on my Crap One page every 7 days. EquiFax updates on my bank account page every 90 days.
How many folks do you know who have spent an entire lifetime being "on-time" with bill payments, financial commitments, and keeping up personal integrity? Several of my credit card issuers issue my personal score along with my statement every month. Here is mine: I am besieged constantly via email (mostly spam), regular mail offering new credit cards, loans, etc., many from banks I have never heard of. Little do they know that, unlike the majority of ego-driven people, I could not care less what that fancy number was...... OTOH, it seems ironic that several of my cards have bumped their credit limits up to where any single one could be used to buy a new car! I broached the concept to my wife(!). Her response? "WHADDAYA NUTS?" Frank
Yes, we tried all our adult lives to be responsible to keep that score up. Now we have our credit history frozen with all three major credit reporting bureaus and seldom get credit card offers any longer. (Thanks to the Experian data breach of 2015.) We have more than enough credit to last our lifetime.
It always used to confuse me that I needed to create debt in order to get credit. Back in the day, I preferred paying a balance in full with cash, until I started having to pay rent. When I finally did get a credit card it got cancelled on me because I never used it, so not making any interest charges for the company. When I got another, I was terrible at paying the balance on time because I had to mail it and I always forgot. Finally when auto deposits and direct debits came along I got my act cleaned up. When I bought my last car and they checked my credit , the guy came back and said, wow, you really don't like having debt, do you? because I had a good record of paying off entire balances on time. My FICO was 856, the highest he'd seen.
Because I have no credit score, they will not give me a credit card. Like the Amish and Mennonites (perhaps years ago), with no credit, they / I / simply pay cash. Whoever a person owes money to, they are a slave to them until it is paid .
I get angry that there are now "apps" to bump up your score. So once the value of a high score becomes diluted, responsible people will be shouldering the risk and the cost of folks who are better at "apps" than they are at paying bills on time. Regarding high limits: When I moved here, Lowes gave me a Credit Limit north of $10,000. I almost laughed when I saw it. I guess if I wanna build an addition... @D'Ellyn Dottir I, too, greatly benefited from online bill pay technology. I used to stretch out my bills until the Due Date, and really hated all the paperwork implicit in checks and envelopes and stamps (that aversion happened when I started doing office work before the computer era.) So things got mailed late. I really love being able to take a bill I receive in today's mail, logging into my bank account, and setting it up to get paid on a specific date. I also agree with the perverted rational with which Ratings are calculated. I was going to kill some credit cards that I never use and my bank told me that if I reduce my amount of unused credit, it will lower my score. I found that if I spaced out the cancellations that the hit was slight and my score recovered in a month or two. It's so stupid.
I don't care because I don't plan on buying anything that requires credit. We seem to be getting lots of email asking this question.
I guess I care, in that I see a poor credit score as a sign of lack of character, but from a practical point of view, it is irrelevant to me.