A Rant About Credit

Our nations' preoccupation with credit file is amazing. I cannot make it through a single day without at least one sales pitch for credit. I cannot read a newspaper without dozens of them. There are stories and ads everywhere: build your credit, fix your credit, what your credit says about you, why credit matters, credit, credit, credit. It's really amazing. Then the institutions who throw money around at anyone who asks are amazed when people wake up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and cannot ever pay it back. Then they buy a few laws that favor them and weaken the one safety net that consumers have left, forcing them to be forever in debt to a multibillion dollar bank for their $575 Visa bill. God Bless America.

Something I have never been able to understand is how my credit rating can affect my auto insurance premium. My credit is about as relevant to my driving ability as my library record. You pay a premium in advance, the insurance is not loaning you any money. I just don't get it. There must be statistics that show people with poor credit have more accidents or something. I guess they're so preoccupied with their bills that they cannot focus on driving or something. If someone can explain it to me, please do. Insurance companies are the ones with the history of finding ways NOT to pay claims.

I just think this using credit is out of control and seems to be spreading into more and more of our lives. Need a job, get a credit check first. What the hell? If anything, the employee should do a credit check on the employer! They are the ones trusting the employer will pay them when their work is complete. I can maybe see the logic behind using it for telephones, because you could charge a huge phone bill and skip out, but a sufficient deposit would discourage that behavior for those of us whose lives don't revolve around our credit score.

Whether it's a credit file or some other database, our lives are becoming governed more and more by those databases that aggregate all of our personal data. There is so much more to a person than their data, and it seems like we are losing sight of that. People have rough times in their life, people have good times. Sometimes your situation can change in a heartbeat, through your own fault or through no fault of your own. This memory of every event of our lives is scary to me. Think about your life now, how it could change; a layoff, a huge medical bill, an accident could forever change your way of life. To be punished for this forever because you fell behind on your payment to Wells Fargo seems absurd.

We, as the people who fill their databases with our lives, have no power over that information. It exists forever, a journal of your life that makes your high school "permanent record" seem trivial. All the while, they get rich by providing this data to anyone willing to pay. It's a lousy system, and one that needs to be changed. I believe it should all be opt-in. If I want or need a credit file, I ask for one. If I don't leave my data alone. When someone uses this information, I am due a royalty. Hey, I can dream.