6 Months

I'd bet that if I were to apply for a credit card today I might well be denied. I am slowly losing my valuable "credit history."

Losing it, because I no longer make regular payments to anything. I've been mortgage free for six months, have no car payments, and don't carry a balance on credit cards. Six months is perhaps the time frame one might need, as a young college student for example, to establish one's credit. It's also, perhaps, the time frame one might need to lose it altogether, too.

Can you imagine? I spend fifteen years squirrelling away every spare nickel to get out of debt only to find that it will cost me more to acquire new debt because I no longer have a "payment history." A new car that might carry a 4.85% APR might cost me 7.35% because I have such "shitty" credit.

I don't believe for a second that this scenario couldn't happen; no, not in today's credit-score driven society. Thirty years ago this wouldn't have been an issue -- I'd offer to a local banker that I own a housal unit and he'd identify me as an acceptable risk and I'd get a loan. Today, the decision to deny me would be made within six milliseconds (6 mS) inside some Cisco server inside a football field sized server farm in Youngstown, Ohio owned by a too-big-to-fail East Coast based bank who, when they fuck up the lending standards as they will again do, would simply lobby upon Washington to force taxpayers to subsidize the losses.

The cost of assessing risk to a lender has dropped, what with a simple "credit score!" nowadays, a score that you have no goddamn way of calculating for yourself. It's a score...like it's some fucking game, and indeed it is! to those in the financial services industry. No longer does a local banker worry about your risk when he can just shuffle off the mortgage to Fannie Mae. Nothing about the securitization food chain that imploded our economy three years ago has changed -- lending standards are supposedly tightened, yes, but the bank still doesn't care about your willingness and ability to pay that back over the next 30 years -- they'll hold it for no more than 30 mS before it's tranched and sold into another mortgage backed security. These things have not gone away -- no, not even.

I should not want to participate in such a system where I'll be penalized for carrying no debt while trying to gain access to some. Yet such hypocrisy is what built the existing financial services sector into the "industry" it is today.