Mine post every month to my credit report as a debt I owe and pay. I wish they wouldn’t.

The whole credit thing is totally overrated in my opinion. I work for a company that does sub-prime lending for auto loans. A lot of our customers are called “ghosts” because they have zero credit history. We do manual underwriting for these people. You can get a loan from us. But you really will NOT like the rate…. its up to 29% on a car loan…

Of course if you buy a car and only finance $500 over the course of 24 months. You won’t pay that much in interest….. The trick is to make sure the company you’re working with actually posts data to the bureaus. A lot of subprime’s do not….

I’d be interested to see if you could get a manual underwriting loan from Churchill mortgage with a zero FICO score or if Dave is just full of crap…. I haven’t met anybody who has confirmed or denied that yet…

I know for a fact you can get a car loan from the company I work for – but it won’t be at normal interest rates….

Personally I wish that so many different aspects of life did not come back to your credit report. House and car insurance rates, health insurance rates, life insurance rates, cell phone rates, utility, renting an apartment, etc….

I was speaking to a girl from Puerto Rico and she said she had to take out a car loan, get a credit card etc, as soon as she arrived just to get a decent rating! It’s so unfair – if you don’t borrow you’re basically screwed.

I paid cash for everything. I paid cash for my own car, I graduated high school with 10k in savings. I got a scholorship to college and worked to pay for housing. Out of college I worked for a company that makes debt collection software (both for 1st and 3rd person collections). I was so afraid I would run up debt like peope in our system that I refused to open a credit card.

Fast forward a few years and I had zero debt and a good job (different company…that place was awful…working for the devil, basically). My husband had a fair amount of debt, but great credit since he always paid it on time. You would think that a couple of 25 year olds very well paid in the software development industry would have an easy time getting a mortgage.

This was not the case.

We talked to ten banks/mortgage institutes and were turned down by nine of them. Since I had zero credit history and it was an automatic no, despite my 60k+ salary and bank savings. We only ended up qualifying for an interest-only loan because my husband’s salary could cover the payments–none of my salary could go towards how much we could qualify to get. Otherwise we could have gotten qualified for much more.

You *need* credit history. Fifteen years ago when you got a loan from the bank where you probably knew the manger from around town, you would be fine with being an upstanding citizen. Today, computers do all the calculation and don’t know how nice of a person you are. They only know risk averages and having no credit usually means alot of horrible things.

I was told by my mortgage guy that having bad credit would be better than none. The super messed up thing is that if I had missed a payment on any of my bills and they had gone to collections, it would have hit my credit history and if I had paid that “debt” back, I would have had credit history and a much easier time getting a job.

That being said, having none makes it a lot easier to build good credit and now, six months later, I have decent credit (but 30% of the calculation has to do with length of accounts being opened so I’m hurt on that point only).

I was so upset because I never got a credit card and always paid cash for everything because I had been taught that this was the best way for me to prepare for one day having a mortgage and a future. Unfortunately, anyone who tells you this, no matter how well published, is giving you outdated advice. The way this works is totally counter intuitive and I just don’t want anyone to make the same uninformed mistake as me.

Follow JH’s advice above. It’s very true and should help you alot.

Good luck getting credit and I hope you avoid the same problems as me!

You NEED to have a credit history. This is big. This is huge.

If you “don’t have a credit report” (say what???), then you need to establish some credit IN YOUR NAME, not jointly in yours and your husband’s name.

Let the jaded old voice of experience explain why: If anything happens to your husband, you will need to have credit. In the chaos that will ensue, you will need to be able to charge things; at minimum this will simplify your life, but under the worst of circumstances it will save your dainty tuchus. You also will need a credit history to rent an apartment, buy a car, even rent a car. Joint credit doesn’t count! If you and he are no longer together, either because he has passed on or because you have split up, the credit trail you have established is not regarded as yours; the assumption is that you probably can’t pay your bills without a partner’s income.

Get this credit established now, because it can be very difficult to open credit accounts and to accomplish anything that requires a credit history once you’re on your own. It does not matter how good your past joint credit was. Trust me: I’ve been through this and it is a bi***!

Obtaining and using a credit card and then paying it off in full at the end of each month is one way to establish a good credit history. Another is to go to a credit union, take out a small loan (say, $2,000), put it in a savings account, and the pay it all back two or three months later. The cost of this maneuver is minimal, and it looks good on a credit report.

You need the 720 Fico when you are ready nd length of credit history is an important market.

You should probably go ahead and get a credit card. (If you qualify for USAA membership, I’d go with them since they have awesome customer service and are regarded as one of the most reputable financial services companies around.) I’d go further than using it once and putting it away, however. If you could use it to pay for one thing a month, say your internet service which you’ve already committed to paying for anyway, and then pay it off promptly every month, you’ll build a continuing record of sensible credit use.