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- [00:00]
Ben Bowlin
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you as always so much for tuning in. Please pardon my slightly Batman voice. A little bit of weather on top of me. But we wanted to bring this episode to you guys. We're very excited about this and also, if being honest, thoroughly confused. Like most of America, we were talking off air when we did a history of credit cards. I believe it was. And Our super producer, Mr. Max Williams, SoundQ and you, Mr. Noel Brown and I, I've been bolin. We started, we started saying, hey, you know what's more confusing than the idea of credit cards? It's the idea of credit scores.
- [01:12]
Noel Brown
Yeah, it does kind of have a language all its own. The idea of like hard versus soft credit inquiries and like the two different reporting agencies, Equifax versus TransUnion and Experian. Experian, exactly. And the idea that like if you check your credit score it gives your credit score a negative impact unless you use credit karma, which I guess is a soft inquiry. I. Yeah, we're going to find out about all this.
- [01:40]
Ben Bowlin
It depends on how you check the score. It comes up every time you need a big purchase a house, a car, a new credit card, a line of a loan. Right. Taking out a loan. If you've ever interacted with the financial system in the United States, folks, you have run into credit scores and arcane agglomeration of numbers that are, are at times purposely obtuse but still wield tremendous influence on the day to day lives of average Americans. Like do you not have enough credit? That's a ding on your score. Do you have too much debt? That's a ding on your score. Did you get a new credit card that has a hard inquiry like you were talking about, Noel? That's a ding on your score. It's. Yeah, it's a weird system to jump.
- [02:28]
Max Williams
In here real quick. I actually I, I lived with a good friend of mine, his name's Phil, a number of years back and very fiscally responsible dude has money, saves money and stuff like that. But we went to get an apartment. We had the problem that he had never had a credit card. This guy who's like never believed in debt. He doesn't just, he just doesn't do it. And it's. They're like, well we can't really give you this apartment without the score. And he goes what? So I have to like put myself in debt to get a, get an apartment. Thankfully they were able to just use my score to get the apartment. But still, it was like. It's like, what? Why are we here?
- [02:59]
Ben Bowlin
You get punished for not participating in the system. It's a very lucrative arrangement for credit institutions and financial institutions, and we'll see that there's a very valid argument. It's a necessary evil. But maybe before we really get into it, can we talk about what a credit score is? What do we mean when we say credit score?
- [03:24]
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- [03:51]
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- [03:55]
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- [04:33]
Unknown
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Ben Bowlin
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Noel Brown
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Ben Bowlin
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Noel Brown
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Ben Bowlin
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- [05:39]
Noel Brown
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- [05:56]
Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford
Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [06:33]
Noel Brown
Talk to your doctor and visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. Yeah, well, your credit score is a three digit number that is a representation of your fiscal responsibility. Basically like you said, Ben, there's a lot of factors and I can't recommend credit karma enough up front because it does break down a lot of this stuff for you with no negative impact for checking it out. It also can connect you with cards and loan types and lines of credit that you might qualify for. Based on your credit score. You know, it can go from 0 to I believe around 900 if I'm not mistaken, Ben, I think that's the maximum. I think a good credit score would be considered somewhere between 6 to 800, like 800 being excellent. I think even 650, 670, 700 is considered excellent.
- [07:34]
Ben Bowlin
Once you get into 7 hundreds you're, you're doing really well.
- [07:37]
Max Williams
I feel like it's weird where it's just like in the 700s is where there's like a lot of change in it. So like upper seven hundreds is like excellent, while lower seven hundreds is like fair.
- [07:47]
Noel Brown
That's right.
- [07:48]
Ben Bowlin
Also that's where you see a lot of fluctuation too because something as small as a, like let's say you have an overdue payment that you missed not because you didn't have the money, but because you somehow lost track of something or got forgotten in the mail. Yeah, right. And then you can, after. After having spent so long accreting positive points, then all of a sudden you're down like 30 points. And it takes a lot. So the mistakes or the missteps have a greater immediate weight than the success or the track record of good financial behavior. And that is something that has long been a subject of criticism amid the public because we can understand that would make somebody feel like the game is rigged.
- [08:41]
Noel Brown
Well, it's interesting too, because one thing that can have a really positive impact on your credit score, but also you have to be careful is paying off a bunch of stuff. But if you pay off a bunch of stuff, then you're no longer utilizing your credit. That can have a negative impact on your credit score, which makes very little sense from a, I don't know, reasoning kind of standpoint.
- [09:04]
Max Williams
And then it gets so much worse if you try to close a credit.
- [09:06]
Noel Brown
Card out because that shortens your history of credit. And God forbid you close a card that you've had for the longest that all of a sudden not only are you likely to have a high limit on a card you've carried for the longest, but that also represents a large portion of your credit history.
- [09:26]
Ben Bowlin
Right. And age, and it changes your debt to credit ratio. It's weird. I mean, I can't be the only one amid us and our fellow ridiculous historians who has a couple of zombie credit cards. I paid them off. I never touched them. Every blue moon, I'll get a letter from one of those companies that say, hey, you have to use this for something or we're going to close it on your behalf. And so I will go make the most ridiculous purchase and then I will aggressively immediately pay it off. It's such a surreal. It's a black comedy situation.
- [10:08]
Noel Brown
I recently had a credit account closed, and it was a Bank of America card. And my oldest credit card account that I've had since I was like in my late teens, early 20s was a bank of America card. So when I saw that, I freaked out because of what I was just saying. I knew that if they had closed my oldest credit account, that would really be a hit on my score. Turns out I had somewhere along the lines gotten an additional bank of America card that they closed. But that kind of made me kind of perk up and realize, okay, I got to make sure that I spend a little something on this long running account or else it'll get closed.
- [10:42]
Ben Bowlin
Exactly. And For a lot of us, that becomes another bureaucratic hassle, because now you have to remember another thing to do right. People will suggest you set up a recurring charge on a card that you never use for subscription, whatever, like Netflix or whatever. But then you have to also, you've given yourself another monthly chore. Anyway, we're speaking to the choir here. For Americans in the crowd, maybe the most simplistic way to think of a credit score is somewhere between a financial version of a report card and a financial version of a fingerprint.
- [11:20]
Noel Brown
Or like it's going on your permanent record, like they always used to say in Nickelodeon shows.
- [11:26]
Ben Bowlin
No, the question is. And permanent records a big part of this, too. The question is, why do we have these things in the first place? We've just spent the first part of this show complaining about the things that are wrong with it, and we are correct. But it is a necessary evil. You know, you're a US Lender. You have to figure out whether this stranger, this person you don't know from a can of paint, will actually pay you back.
- [11:51]
Noel Brown
Especially if they don't have any tangible assets like a home or a property or real estate, land, whatever, things that you can actually measure and say, okay, this person has this quote, unquote, collateral. So that forces folks like that, if they want to play, they got to pay, they got to get into the system.
- [12:10]
Ben Bowlin
Exactly, exactly. And that's why you can be punished for not participating in the system, for not having a credit card. In the case of those big purchases, like you're talking about a car or a house, many people will not be paying for the thing all at once. It's just not feasible. You'll pay off the full cost of the asset over some window of time. This is where you get things like car loans and mortgages. A credit score helps people figure out whether you are able to make those payments consistently. And because it incorporates your past credit shenanigans, it gives these institutions a surprisingly accurate snapshot of your past and present, all meant to predict your future actions. And it's. I didn't know this. The idea of credit scores is surprisingly recent, which is nuts, because the concept of debt is like 5,000 years old.
- [13:08]
Noel Brown
That's right. In fact, in debt, the first 5,000 years, updated and Expanded by David Graeber, is a fantastic resource for this exploration. In that work, he explores how, for most of human history, what we would call credit reporting has been deeply personal, meaning very invasive, and the kind of thing that would be assessed on a case by case basis. By a lender who often is not going to be offering a codified set of terms or, you know, interest rates. Vig, let's call it. Right. The history of lending is a history of taking advantage of people. Especially before institutions, you know, for better or worse, swooped in, in more modern times to kind of regulate that kind of stuff.
- [13:57]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah. Travel back with US folks to the 1700s United States, for example, or what would become it? If you're a storekeeper and you want to start a business or you need a loan, the way you get a loan is not by filling out a form. You go to the most successful guy in town, hope you're friends with them, maybe an authority, like a politician or someone in the religious structure. And you, you say, hey, will you go to this banker, this merchant and tell them, you know, I know Phineas. Phineas is a good dude and he'll pay you for those beans like the.
- [14:39]
Noel Brown
Cut of his jib. That's right. You really did. It was a vibes based system, Ben, as you so astutely put it here. Beginning in the 1820s, however, credit reporting started to modernize a little bit. That's because there were just so many businesses and so many business transactions being made under a thriving economy that was beginning, beginning to sort of come into its own in a very modern way. The old ways just didn't make sense anymore. They just didn't hold. So there were, like I said, there were beginning to be new laws and regulations in place that would potentially protect people, but also potentially made loans a little bit of a riskier proposition because bankruptcy was a thing meaning that you could default on loans and not be penalized, you know, for those. It would certainly wreck you personally for a time. Bankruptcy is no joke, but it does mean that people that have lent you that capital are out in the cold.
- [15:39]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah. And bankruptcy laws, the new ones that were coming about at this time did, as you said, make loans riskier. And they also provided some manners of protection or some degree of protection for people and businesses under those laws. As a result of this, we see a series of experiments in trying to standardize what, what we mean when we say credit. All these early forays were limited to commercial credit, loans to businesses, to business people, but still, they would later have profound implications for consumer credit, which is what we were both complaining about at the beginning of this show. There's a great article about this by Sean Trainor writing for Time, and Sean introduces us to probably the most important of those experiments. In the 1800s, the Mercantile Agency, which was created in 1841 in the Panic.
- [16:44]
Noel Brown
Of 1837, a depression caused by over speculation, overextension of line of credits by merchants essentially borrowing more than they could pay back, causing kind of a cascading effect of defaults. Tappan, Lewis Tappan that you mentioned, decided he needed to systematize that kind of vibes based form of asking for credit in terms of debtors vouching for the borrower's character and their assets. So he went out doing some kind of fact finding and soliciting some information from correspondents throughout the entire country. His agency sort of crystallized all of this stuff into various reports that were assembled into massive ledgers that were held in New York City. So this was essentially the beginnings of a kind of credit worthiness database.
- [17:41]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah. And basically these guys are spies. They're going out to these other, you know, by hook or by crook. They're going to figure out the stuff they don't want you to know. Right. When it comes to these businesses and their credit. The mercantile agency used these correspondence to, like we were saying, get information from across the country from lenders as well as from borrowers. So it did become a predecessor to a credit reporting agency, but it also went deep. This is why I say espionage and spying. They would figure out someone's marital status, their ethnic background, their age, any potential social scandal. They knew about their politics and their sex lives and they were super duper biased. The reporters were primarily white and male and they had no. They did not hesitate to include their prejudices in their com. In their conversations things.
- [18:41]
Noel Brown
No scruples. Zero scruples.
- [18:44]
Ben Bowlin
They thought that they were. We can only imagine they thought that they were doing ethical reporting, but it was based on their own, you know, their own social perspective. There was one credit reporter from Buffalo, New York who noted, quote, prudence in large transactions with all Jews should be used.
- [19:08]
Noel Brown
No.
- [19:08]
Ben Bowlin
Yes.
- [19:09]
Noel Brown
He did not say that.
- [19:10]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah. So, you know, the argument being, hey, this business looks good on paper. But I did some digging and I remembered I'm anti Semitic.
- [19:21]
Noel Brown
That's so jacked up too. Because there's also the antisemitic perspective that Jews like are really good with money. You know, like it's, it's. I just like it's weird how you can see racist people wanting to have it both ways.
- [19:35]
Max Williams
Yeah.
- [19:35]
Ben Bowlin
You know what I mean? And not even mentioning, you know, the racism against African Americans. Right.
- [19:42]
Noel Brown
Well, we should mention it a little bit, I think. Yeah. Another reporter in Post Civil War Georgia described a liquor store owner, A.G. marks, his business Described it as being a low Negro shop. Gross.
- [19:58]
Ben Bowlin
Gross. And this means that there's a much higher likelihood of loans being denied, or I would say equally as probable having very predatory loans extended and saying, hey, we're the only folks who will play ball with you Anyway. Yeah. This discrimination had profound consequences. Again. First, it reinforced existing social inequalities, just like the later practice that we're all familiar with, redlining, which is where in the world of real estate, it's a way to systemize racial discrimination. But this was all still. No, this was all still a collection of rumors. This was a whisper factory. People were just turn. They were getting paid to turn in reports that were like, this guy is supposed to have money. People at the local. At the local cracker barrel say he has money. Or people at the local saloon say, he is a real cad, but he's good at business and he'll pay us back. That's not how credit reporting should work. No.
- [21:09]
Noel Brown
And there's part of me that was like, okay, good job, to try to pull together some kind of less vibes based systematized method for credit reporting. But really all this did was give the power to a select few on a much larger scale. At least before you could like talk to your buddy and get a loan, you know, whatever your ethnic background was, if your buddy was cool with you, he'd say good things and then you'd get the loan. But now you've got people that you can't even see face to face to make your case. Digging and snooping into your business and adding some pretty gnarly, hyperbolic, you know, little twists to these reports. Twists of the knife that are not really necessarily based in reality.
- [21:58]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah, exactly. They're kind of pushing their own thing into the conversation. And people are realizing the problem here. These are not government agencies. The Mercantile Agency and its rival, the Bradstreet Company, which is kind of Pepsi to the Coke here. They're private entities and people pay for their services. They are increasingly irritated with this because it's messing with their money. So they say, we want a more simplified, reliable, less subjective evaluation method. And this creates what our buddy Sean Trainor calls a pseudoscientific sleight of hand.
- [22:42]
Noel Brown
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- [22:46]
Ben Bowlin
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- [22:54]
Noel Brown
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- [23:23]
Ben Bowlin
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- [23:31]
Noel Brown
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- [23:36]
Ben Bowlin
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- [23:40]
Noel Brown
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- [23:44]
Ben Bowlin
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- [24:14]
Ben Bowlin
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- [28:39]
Noel Brown
You have collected and make them into math.
- [28:41]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah.
- [28:41]
Noel Brown
That we've created. Yeah.
- [28:43]
Ben Bowlin
Quantify them. We'll, we'll use alchemy. That sounds legit. Until you learn about it. We'll use that to make it sound like we have mathematically determined something.
- [28:54]
Noel Brown
It lends it more credence when it's like this number that you can understand or you can see on paper and say oh okay, that number is high. That my person must be very reliable. But you still, it. It hides all of the factors that actually go into what that number is. By design. Pioneered by the Bradstreet Company in 1857, commercial credit rating would assume a much more lasting form in 1864 under the mercantile agency renamed R.G. dunn and Company. On the very eve of the Civil War, it finalized this numeric system, alphanumeric system that would continue in use well into the 21st century. The companies later merged like they do, becoming Dunn and Bradstreet. A real, real monopoly.
- [29:46]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah, very much so. And as, as the musician said, you ain't seen nothing yet. Buh, buh, buh, baby. So this is, this is strange because credit scoring factored in a lot of other large scale quantification operations of the time. Population management, statistical analysis, espionage. But it was still, it was novel in its own right because it had what we could call financial identity. Like you said. No. A number or an alphanumeric system that says we're going to summarize everything you need to know about this person. We'll give you the elevator pitch about this person. And that number, that rating will change if they suffer what we will call a lapse in fortune or discipline. And the people who loved it had these glowing terms. One guy said the mercantile agency might be well termed a bureau for the promotion of honesty. Cool. Sure.
- [30:53]
Noel Brown
Yeah, cool story. Seems legit. No? So by the end of the Civil War the. There were these kind of three steadfast pillars of modern credit reporting. Private sector mass surveillance that made credit reports possible. A deep, deep bureaucracy involving information sharing, making the rating system widely available and also accepted by kind of polite society and by big industries, and also made them actionable and acknowledged widely by, you know, large corporations, entities that could lend money on a large scale, all of that. So all of this was still for the purposes of business and not yet for individuals, right, Ben? This would. To get to that place would take quite a bit longer.
- [31:48]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah, yeah. And the lessons learned in commercial credit evaluation did deeply inform what we call consumer credit today. And the stories are weirdly similar. So just like with consumer debt, consumer credit reporting wasn't really a needed thing in early America because there wasn't a density of business propositions. There were fewer people, there were fewer jobs. It was easier for folks to know each other personally. But then by the second half of the 1800s, the success of the labor movement means there are a lot of people who are working less and making more. And they deserved it, for the record. And this meant that retailers, including those fancy pants guys at the department stores and in the auto industry, they wanted to get some of that hard earned middle class money, so they made their own credit loss lines. Your financial reputation, you as a person became another product from the private market.
- [32:57]
Noel Brown
Yeah. And we delve deep into this in our episode on credit cards because this really is the kind of advent of the modern credit card. They even like had these sort of like proprietary printed, you know, whatever. Some of them, I think were even on like pieces of metal or something.
- [33:12]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah, that guy who just wanted to not have to immediately pay cash for dinner in New York. That's how it started.
- [33:20]
Noel Brown
Yeah, it was a real flex. That's true. So the system was, of course, as we've already kind of detailed up to this point, didn't really change. Rife with misinformation and absolutely ripe for corruption and abuse. It definitely paved the way for the coming Great depression, which is just a terrible name. Not good. It wasn't great at all. It was pretty awful. But it also did help create that middle class, that pursuit. Right. That we always talk about, of happiness. The idea that you too can live the catalog dream of American life.
- [33:55]
Ben Bowlin
Give it a go. You can pursue it, my guy. So the men and women who were evaluating consumer credit at these various different retail outfits, they were still decentralized. There was no single dominant firm in charge of this. Instead, these individuals were employed directly by retailers as credit managers. But they were in the know. These were all smart cookies. They picked up the techniques pioneered by those earlier Firms, the Dun and Bradstreet types. In 1912, the credit managers get together and form a national trade association and they start comparing notes. How do you best collect, share and codify or uniformize information on the people who go to your car dealership or the people who go to Sears? It's like the early days of soda pop. There are a lot of things there for a second and then a lot of them fizzle out. Oh, my God.
- [35:01]
Noel Brown
There you go. Way better.
- [35:03]
Ben Bowlin
But we got to give a shout out, dubious shout out to our fair metropolis. No. One of the most successful firms in this era was Atlanta's retail credit company.
- [35:17]
Noel Brown
Yeah. The Atlanta Retail Credit Company absolutely left a mark on the idea of credit reporting. It was founded in 1899. It developed files on millions of Americans over the span of 60 years. And this information included not just credit data, assets, character, again, very vague. But also information on individuals, social, political and, yes, sexual lives.
- [35:46]
Ben Bowlin
Dangerous. He's good with money, but he's a known frauist and a communist. Yeah. RCC was kind of like Comcast. They were not popular with the public, but they were very big in their field. And people were increasingly skeptical of their process for a long time. For the earliest decades, they were collecting this information and storing it on paper in file cabinets, filing cabinets. But in the 1960s, the firm went public with their plan to computerize their records, making them much easier to access.
- [36:26]
Noel Brown
And Ben, I gotta give you props for this quote you found in the New York Times from Alan Weston, who is privacy advocate from 1968. I feel like he's predicting the future here. Almost inevitably, he said, transferring information from a manual file onto a computer triggers a threat to civil liberties, to privacy, to a man's very humanity, because access is so simple.
- [36:51]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah. He feared that digitization would make it impossible for the average person to move beyond past missteps or mistakes, no matter when they occurred. And Dun dun, dun, dun dun. He was not far off.
- [37:07]
Noel Brown
Now, he also wasn't the first to make this observation and to make this argument. As far back as 1936, Time magazine explored one particular woman's move from Chicago to Los Angeles and how quickly her debts were and dark financial past, well, and personal past were discovered by credit reporters in this expose. It showed the frightening power of this surveillance state type operation and how incredibly dangerous credit reporting agencies could be for individuals.
- [37:44]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah, yeah. And you know, the privacy violations alone are deeply concerning. But also consider this kind of information, if computerized, and if there was a way to make it widely available, it could be used just to aid and abet some terrible things. Like, a lot of people who skip town are trying to escape domestic violence situations. So what if your abuser can figure out where you have gone and then find you? So this is. I mean, that's just one case, but there are a lot of concerns. This computerization also galvanized the moves toward mergers and acquisition and monopolization. In the 1960s, there were more than 2,000 credit bureaus across the United States. And by, let's see, the 1980s, that number had shrunk to five. And then it shrunk to the three major credit bureaus we have today.
- [38:44]
Noel Brown
I had no idea that it was that tight of a timeline. 2000 credit bureaus, that just seems so untenable because they're all operating with different metrics, you know, like, I mean, how could you make heads or tails of that with that many credit reporting bureaus? So even three, like I was saying at the top of the show, feels a little muddled.
- [39:04]
Ben Bowlin
Right? They don't agree.
- [39:05]
Noel Brown
Yeah, they don't agree. But again, it is. Sorry, I can't. Can't say enough. If you go to credit karma, you can see your. Two of the major. The top credit reporting bureaus. You can see your score on both of those and kind of compare them and see how various factors play into what that score is for the different bureaus.
- [39:23]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah, and there's a guy who gets mentioned a lot in these explorations, Josh Lauer, who is the author of a book called Credit A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. And he helps shed some light on how this monopolization occurs. He says, look, before the 60s, all the files were in filing cabinets. They were on paper and cards. There were these bureaus that were doing well. They had a lot of money. What they would do is come and find a local or regional credit bureau. They would buy up all their information, they'd acquire that smaller interest, then they would computerize it and add it to their dragon's hoard of data.
- [40:04]
Noel Brown
Is this. Any of this sound familiar?
- [40:05]
Ben Bowlin
Y'all like banking?
- [40:07]
Noel Brown
No, no, Just the idea of, like, your personal data being bought and sold and traded like Pokemon cards. Like, it's not new.
- [40:16]
Max Williams
It. When we were going through that earlier beer where they're talking about, like, you know, your sex life, your ethnicity, I'm like. I'm listening to. I'm like, this sounds like Facebook to me. Information era, like, level stuff. Just data mining.
- [40:28]
Noel Brown
Definitely. Exactly. That's the term I was thinking of. Max data mining. But like, you know, and then the whole idea of changing the credit reporting to something that's more fact based and less, you know, perhaps personal information based. Sure. That's how that industry evolved. Perhaps. But then you still have, you know, all of the social media stuff and all of that information floating out there and it can't not have an impact, I would imagine, you know, on things like insurability, for example. You know, if you have images out there of yourself doing certain things, your insurance company could catch wind of that and drop you, drop you from your policy. I mean, you know, this stuff has.
- [41:07]
Ben Bowlin
Real world implications and that's important to know, especially for all of our younger ridiculous historians in the crowd. The streets are in a very real way watching and the erosion of privacy is a real thing. It is being used against you. So be very careful what you post. The dopamine rush from likes and clicks is not worth it. So this is. That sounded a little ominous, but it's accurate.
- [41:35]
Noel Brown
Yeah, but individual results may vary. You know, I've kind of chosen to be a one platform kind of guy. I'm Instagram all the way and I've curated my algorithm to feed me lots of nice food pics and art stuff and travel things. And I don't think I put too too much personal information out there. I'm pretty comfortable with the balance that I've struggled.
- [41:55]
Ben Bowlin
Truck I'm on Instagram as well. I'm on several of those platforms just primarily to interact with authors I like. And then being public facing folks, I gotta say one of the best things you can do folks just very quick opsec not to get too stuff they don't want you to know. If you're traveling, don't post specifics about you traveling until after you're back home safe. Just don't do it. That's how you get got anything? Anyway, this outcry of computerization of an information state emerging in the private industry. This resulted in some legal action, thankfully. Most notably the Fair Credit Reporting act of 1970 which said, look, if you're a bureau, you can't keep black boxing stuff. Open your files to the public. You also have to expunge data on race, sexuality or disability. And after a certain window of time you have to delete some negative information. That's where we get the old trope of like this stays on your report for you know, seven years or whatever.
- [43:01]
Noel Brown
Clark Howard says those hard inquiries, I forget the exact number. I think it's actually variable, but I think it's up to two years and they can drop off quicker than that depending on other factors, some of which are not as obvious as maybe one would like, but I think it's wild that we didn't have a fair credit Reporting act until 1970 up to that point. As you could probably imagine with those 2,000 agencies, it was an absolute free for all. You know, like truly a period of zero oversight Wild west kind of stuff. So this was a really big deal, the idea that you could no longer use things like race, sexuality, disability as a metric for someone's credit score, which I think is a huge deal, but it certainly did not end credit reporting. See Gladiator 2 only in theaters November.
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- [51:00]
Noel Brown
That is very true. And I also do want to point out I know I've been beating the drum for Credit Karma. I did once and I'll never do this again. I think for my next Car purchase. I'm going to do, like, Carvana or one of those. Zero Dealership. I just don't want to do a deal. I don't like dealerships. I don't like the way they treat you. I don't like the way they bait and switch you. Sorry. If there's anyone out there that's a car dealer and you correct me if I'm wrong, maybe there's good ones, but my experience has been not good. Very high pressure. Very like, I literally had someone say to me, oh, you didn't tell me you wanted the lowest interest rate. I'm like, are you what? Like, isn't that, like, understood? Anyway, I basically had to negotiate. After they gave me a crappy offer, I had to be like, no, you gotta do better than that. But they did tell me that they gave me my scores and they were close to what Credit Karma said, but not exact. They were a little bit lower.
- [51:56]
Ben Bowlin
There are also different internal scores that financial institutions may use to rank you that you will not generally see because they're not for the public. But the big Three, that triumvirate of credit, has attempted to resolve some of their larger discrepancies. So they joined forces and possied up with a tech company to create a credit scoring algorithm. This company's name, fair, Isaac and Company. You may know them by their street name, Fico.
- [52:28]
Noel Brown
That's right. Found that in 1956, the firm had already been selling algorithms, selling the aforementioned credit score algorithms for decades when the big Three started their quest for industry domination and for standardization of credit scores. So the results, which hit the market in 1989, was very similar to the very algorithm we still see today. And it spread because I would say up to this point, it was the best one, it was the most equitable.
- [53:00]
Ben Bowlin
One, it was the least bad.
- [53:03]
Noel Brown
Okay, fair enough.
- [53:04]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah. And this spreads like wildfire. Today, nearly everyone in America has a codified financial identity of some sort. It's really tough to live entirely off the grid. It's simply a reality of American life. And history reminds us yet again that as common as that seems now, credit scoring is not universal. People in the past were definitely correct to worry about the concentration of power in the hands of these secretive private organizations. And it's nuts because we don't talk about it often, but these credit companies had to regularly defend themselves against charges of espionage. People even called them the new inquisition at times for their snoopiness, their snoopy doops. But this is also still even now. It's a way of maintaining Social hierarchy. Maybe not by design, but in practice. Because you can create these very dangerous, damaging feedback loops of credit. Especially if you are a poorer American. Your lower credit score will translate to bigger down payments, higher interest rates on purchases. It's expensive to be poor. And then if you have this extra knock on strain added to your household budget, it raises your likelihood of having bankruptcy and defaulting on your loans. And what does that do? Ding, ding, ding. It lowers your credit score even more.
- [54:38]
Noel Brown
See, I'm looking at my scores right now. Transunion and Equifax is what credit karma shows. My TransUnion score is up 9, but my Equifax score is down 13 points. It's like it's a mystery and there are things that it can show, but why did it affect one one way and the other another way? And we will help you guys out with a little bit of detail around how that FICO score is determined.
- [55:02]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah, yeah, you can click see what changed. And I'm a fan of credit karma as well. You know, they're not paying us to say this. This is just, I think a very accessible resource for those of us who are lay folk, who are not wizards of financial formula, nor sorcerers of something else that begins with an S for the alliteration. We'll keep it in like that. Boy, I'm under the weather anyway. So is this imperfect? Absolutely. Is it potentially dangerous? For sure. But as ridiculous as the origins may be, the credit score still fills a modern need. Because the alternative would be going back to the days of old. You have to rely on personal relationships. You need money for your business. You better hope you're cool with the people in town who already run everything because they're the ones who approve you. Also, credit scores give us a good read on society overall. It helps us see the financial forest. Large trends in credit reports are used to inform decisions about housing and insurance, cost of utilities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know, I'd say ridiculous beginning, still kind of a ridiculous thing. Necessary evil maybe. Noel, we can end with a little bit of demystification. We did find out some of the ratio of what makes a FICO credit score.
- [56:32]
Noel Brown
Yes, unlike other credit reporting scoring methods of yesteryear, age, gender, marital status, all of that as we mentioned, no longer considered. Instead we look at, well, they look at five factors to calculate an individual's FICO credit score. And maybe we round robin this one. Ben, number one, which can affect 35. It has a 35% effect on your Credit score is payment history.
- [56:58]
Ben Bowlin
Duh.
- [56:58]
Noel Brown
Anyone could probably think that's probably the most important factor. If you're getting behind on your payments, if you're defaulting on paying, getting collections taken out against you, that is not going to be good. So that is the number one factor of determining that FICO score. Whether or not you've paid past credit accounts on time.
- [57:16]
Ben Bowlin
And number two, how much do you owe? That's 30% of your grade here. The total amount of credit and loans you are currently using compared to your total all in credit limit. Counting all your cards, counting all the, all the debts, all the assets. This is known as your utilization rate. And real quick note here, FICO scores, the typical score ranges from 300 to 850.
- [57:46]
Noel Brown
850, I was close. I said 900.
- [57:48]
Ben Bowlin
You can get a 900 score with something called Vantage score, but not really with fico. It's kind of like those professors who, and I know some of these professors who on the first day of the class tell you no one gets an A in their class.
- [58:01]
Noel Brown
Oh, what a flex. Don't care for that.
- [58:03]
Ben Bowlin
I don't love it.
- [58:04]
Noel Brown
Yeah, I don't care for it either. Number three, length. We've mentioned all of these in passing and at one point or another I believe maybe minus number five, which we'll get to. But number three, length of credit history which has a 15% impact on your FICO score and that says it all in the name, the length of time that you've held these various credit accounts. And it's averaged. I was just talking off mic about how I was looking at mine. My average credit age is five years. But that bank of America card I mentioned earlier, I've had for 18 years. So it's an average of all of the various accounts. So if you have a very old account, but then you've applied for a bunch in recent times, that will lower the average age of your credit history. So do be careful there. But again, only a 15% hit. So not a massive factor. Number four.
- [58:55]
Ben Bowlin
And so if we go to number four, this is one we hadn't mentioned as explicitly. You heard us talk about soft via hard inquiries on credit. The reason that affects your credit score is because new credit, new credit is 10% of your grade and new credit may be a misleading term there. It's not just how often, often you open new accounts, it's how often you attempt to open new accounts. How often you apply for something which creates that hard inquiry which helps the system understand, hey, why is this person Johnny Blue Jeans out in Omaha. Why did they just apply for 10 credit cards?
- [59:37]
Noel Brown
Now, that being said, Ben, I did find something out in some research that if you are shopping around for a major loan or a major mortgage type thing or a car, offer a loan like that, you only get hit like once. It does determine if you do it within a period of time. I don't know exactly how this is determined, but you're not going to have all seven of those hard inquiries stay on your account. It'll limit it to. Because you shopped around and they understand that. So I don't know exactly how that's determined. You can report hard inquiries that are made in error that you believe to these bureaus and potentially have them removed. Good luck with that. I would argue the bureaucracy behind these organizations is probably pretty thick.
- [60:23]
Ben Bowlin
Yeah. And it's also, you know, the standing position for your credit should be to have your credit frozen and unfreeze it when you want to. Anyway, here's number five. This is, this is an important point. They're not looking at just the amount of debt to credit you have, not just your utilization, but the kind of credit you have. Credit cards are different from installment loans, which are different from mortgage loans. So all of that goes into effect to keep this crazy thing we call modern Americanist society sort of afloat until something goes wrong. Wrong. I declare the verdict on credit scores ridiculous. Though necessary. I hate to say it, but the last question.
- [61:10]
Noel Brown
No, I completely agree. Yeah, just really quickly back to that credit mix. That's interesting, isn't it, Ben? You get a boost for how. It's almost like having a portfolio. Because on the one hand, if you're thinking about debt in one way, it's better. Nobody wants to be carrying a bunch of debt. But when you get to a certain point financially in your life, you want to carry debt. It's good to carry a mortgage because it boosts your credit score. So like the idea of, you know, some people will be like, oh, should I pay my house off early? The answer there by some financial experts would be no, because then you're getting that off of your credit report and that's not good for you long term. So to carry a large note like that on your credit, credit report is a good thing and it shows that you're capable of making those payments as opposed to, you know, making one lump sum or whatever. So again, I'm not an expert here. This is what I've been told. So your information may be different. And please do let us know if I'm absolutely full of crap. But it's something that I was told.
- [62:12]
Ben Bowlin
And that credit mix, so that is 10% of your overall grade. Those are the big factors and you can see already they can interact with one another in quite complex ways. Another kind of debt that would be under a special umbrella would be things like student loans, you know what I mean, which are often already wrapped up in governmental action. So we hope this finds you in good health and amid grand adventure. Folks, thanks for tuning in. Thanks as always to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. Thank you to Jonathan Strickland, aka the Quick, aka the Ridiculous History credit correspondent. He's coming to spy on you in a town nearby the rhcc.
- [62:59]
Noel Brown
That's what he is. That's right, Hughes. Thanks Chris Frasiotis, nev's Jeff Coates here in spirit. What do we say? We got the quizzter. Well, how about the puzzler? Aj Bahamas Jacobs. Big thanks to you as well, bud.
- [63:10]
Ben Bowlin
Big, big thanks to Alex Williams, currently bivouacking out there in Austin. Safe travels, bro. You're an excellent composer. And Noel, big thanks to you.
- [63:19]
Noel Brown
Ah, and you as well. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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