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Were you trying to purchase the car straight-up full cost and they still wouldn't sell it to you ? Or were you trying to get financing on it?
Financing.
As an aside, it's really flattering that you guys think I'm successful enough to just buy a car outright when needed. I wish.
In the end, I just had my father co-sign the note with me, which is something that's done when you either have no credit or bad credit. Not great, but not terrible.
I'm confused as to why you're annoyed about the existence of a "risk of lending money" rating when you would also like to to be leant money.
It's like being mad that traffic lights exist but also wanting to drive on a road without getting t-boned. Credit scores enable institutions to lend you the money to get the car you want, and keep overall borrowing costs lower for you!
It’s annoying when ‘I am very careful about borrowing money’ gets interpreted as ‘I am a bad credit risk’. One understands why but it’s still insulting.
“It’s annoying when ‘I am very careful about not creeping out women’ gets interpreted as ‘I am a bad boyfriend risk’.”
In most domains of life, the only way to credibly demonstrate capability and low risk is to have a track record of actually undertaking that activity successfully. If you were in a place to loan out thousands of dollars to a stranger, you’d want to see a credit history too.
Well, yes, your example causes a lot of misery too.
Like I say, I understand the reasoning but getting punished for being virtuous is still very frustrating!
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Come on man, your expectations aren't reasonable here. You wanted to borrow money, so of course your credit history was relevant. That isn't "needing to borrow to function", that is "needing to borrow to build confidence that you can be trusted to borrow more".
Why wouldn't income history be enough to build confidence that I can pay shit back? Naturally, someone who gets paid in cash under the table can't provide one, but even in the land of Freedom such inconveniently physical dealings are rare in the year of 2025 on a high enough salary level... right?
I found out in a rather bizarre and mildly alarming way that income doesn't mean shit.
When I bought a house, they went over my finances with a colonoscopy camera. Credit score of course, but they wanted to know all my assets, all my debts, everything. When I cashed out a bunch of CDs to pay the down payment, they wanted to know why there was a $60 and change difference because of the 30 day interest penalty I paid for breaking them. I actually had zero debt, and enough assets to just buy the house outright. That was apparently enough for them to not even bother verifying my income. They just didn't give a fuck. I only know this because my company's accountant was shocked when she found out I bought a house, because she would have been the one to verify my income and they never contacted her.
The underwriter for the loan, Fannie Mae, also waived the appraisal and went "Fuck it, the house is worth whatever you say it's worth". This was a huge relief for us, even as it set off further red flags about the state of the mortgage industry, because if the appraisal didn't come up to the sale price, we'd be on the hook for the difference. Probably would have come out of reducing the 20% down we had.
This was circa 2021. I've heard some people tell me this story is impossible. My realtor had never see Fannie Mae waive an appraisal before. Apparently it was part of some sort of COVID measure if you had good enough credit.
Anyways, the moral of the story is, income means nothing. Everyone has an income, and yet most people struggle to service their debts.
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Because "living above your means" exists on any income level, and if you earn so much, but aren't financially irresponsible, why aren't you buying with cash to begim with?
My cash could be bound up in investments.
What's the practical difference between "I can prove I have been earning $X/month for years" and "I can prove I paid back $Y/month of credit card loans for years"? The latter case doesn't mean I can't suddenly stop being responsible any more than the former.
I don't know how American banks do things, but surely they'd take your assets into account as well? Worst case scenario, I'm sure they'd give you a loan against your investments as collateral? Isn't that how Elon financed his Twitter purchase?
The former establishes your ability to pay given responsible behavior, the latter establishes that you had a pattern of responsible behavior, while providing some useful metrics on the size of loans you were able to manage.
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Because income is only one part of it. Yes, you need to have sufficient income to pay back the loan, but lenders want confidence that you actually will, rather than just defaulting by choice. Your question doesn't make sense to me - if some rich guy came up to you and asked to borrow $10,000, would you lend it to him just because you know he has the means to pay you back? I certainly wouldn't, as I don't know the guy or his character. So I don't see why professional lenders would be any different in wanting some kind of validation that you are the kind of person to actually pay back a loan.
Presumably the banks have an easier time beating money out of rich guys who default than I do. That's why the banks lend money and I don't. At any rate my first thought is not "will he pay me back" but "if he doesn't, can I make him".
Looking at the US situation from the outside it just looks like banks expect a consistent credit history only because credit card use is widespread, and credit card use is widespread because banks expect a consistent credit history. Aside from minor benefits of credit cards over debit cards the primary beneficiary appear to be the banks.
To the extent that they can take collateral, sure. But the situation was a car, a depreciating asset. The collateral isn't nearly as valuable. Besides which, even having collateral doesn't mean there's no reason to try to lower risk further by only lending to people who are likely to be trustworthy.
That's not true at all. Banks expect a consistent credit history because they want to establish that you are a low-risk loan. It has nothing to do with credit cards.
I would assume that banks are less reluctant giving loans to people with no credit history in countries where credit card use is not as widespread. Consider the higher education inflation. Same thing. In theory all employers want someone who meets a certain standard of diligence. In practice, having everyone go through the gauntlet of getting diligence credentials simply raises the standards and makes them overly rigid.
Two things
you can build credit history / credit score without ever owning a credit card, credit cards are just easy af to access
if Trump banned credit scores overnight and scrubbed them all from every server with genie magic, banks would still lend you money tomorrow, interest rates would just rise across the board to cover the increased risk resulting from the lesser ability to judge the risk of default
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That's certainly possible. But that doesn't make it true. To settle the issue with any real certainly one would need to quantity loan reluctance in some way, then show that it is indeed less in those other countries.
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