I’ve been shopping around for mortgages, which is the financial equivalent of a rectal exam. I was talking to one broker on the phone today and I swear when the woman said “Ok, let’s take a look at your credit report,” I heard a latex glove snapping.
The good news is my financial hemorrhoid seems to be clearing up. All of those paying-my-bills-on-time suppositories seem to be working. Yes, I could go on with this analogy all day, but I’ll spare you.
Suffice it to say that when I was in college I made a number of stupid mistakes. The first was, of course, going to college in the first place, but more on that later. The second was paying the tuition on credit cards. Then there were a bunch involving alcohol. More on some of those later too, if you behave.
I learned my lesson, which was that 29.9% APR really adds up when you only make $9 per hour part time, the hard way. And, of course, wasted much money and ruined my credit score. Luckily that is a temporary problem and mine is on the mend, but still I some times suffer for it.
Honestly I can’t believe I was that stupid. Like just about all of my biggest mistakes, that one can’t be blamed on parenting. My father was a shining example of good money management and always told me about the importance of good credit and how much money it saves you in the long run. But as Oscar Wilde once said, “The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.”
So I ignored it and now I’m paying for my mistakes in the form of higher interest rates. My credit rating has gone up quite a bit over the last few years and will continue to do so for a while, but it’s still not where I’d like it to be. Luckily I’ve got a lot of the one thing more important than credit: cash. It turns out that if you’re willing to put enough down on a house they’ll let you just tell them how much you make and how much in assets you have without even asking you to prove it. I could pretty much tell them I’m a billionaire and they won’t question it as long as I can write them a sizeable check. That’s so Las Vegas, even if the mortgage company is based in Delaware.
Also, I’m just curious, why the hell does the scale for credit scores range from 330-830? Who came up with those numbers? Why not make it 0-500, or 500-1000 if you don’t want to insult anyone by calling them a zero? Maybe I should invent a metric credit score sytem.
