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Comment by devmor | Hacker News Reader

Or you end up with the opposite end of the problem. I grew up in destitute poverty and was told all my childhood that credit was an evil trap - I should absolutely never use it.

Well, spring forward to me starting a pretty good career as a software developer and wanting to get my first reliable car. I had no credit history and ended up with a 19% APR. That really, really sucked.

It's been 10 years since then and I still get dinged for not having "enough" credit history despite having a couple car loans and several credit cards that I rotate bills on. The whole system feels like it's designed to punish anyone who doesn't fit into the role of a perfect consumer.

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You didn't get fucked with 19% apr because you had no credit history. You got fucked with 19% APR because either the parameters of the loan were really bad or there were some other circumstances. Income less existing obligations vs payment size account for the lion's share of interest rate on an auto loan or just about any other consumer loan.

Credit history is massively over-sold as being impactful by the kind of idiots who live payment to payment.

I agree. My first use of credit was a car loan when I graduated. I had the offer letter to show income (I had not started yet) and some up front sign on / relocation money for the down payment.

It was fine, I paid it off quickly.

No, I got 19% APR because I had no credit history. I know this because there is a big detailed letter full of reasons for your offered rate that you receive when you take out a loan.

The fact that you don’t know this suggests you probably don’t know a lot about how loans work.

I got a car loan at a 8% rate right out of undergrad… you got hosed, maybe you were in a hyperinflationary environment though.

I bet they sent you a letter telling you it was your lack of credit history. You didn’t find one of the many credit providers and have them fight to give you the best rate?

Credit is an extremely elementary thing to grok in a day or so

> I still get dinged for not having "enough" credit history

Maybe the data is wrong? I took out a few loans over the years with strange comments from the lenders like "You don't have much credit history", but since it didn't impact anything I didn't think much of it. Somewhere down the line a lender was like "I don't think this is you". Turns out that it wasn't.

What do you mean? Your credit report was someone else’s credit history?

As I understood it, it was a bit stranger than that. There was some minimal activity on the report that was actually me (a phone account, if I remember right), but my credit cards and whatnot didn't show up. But also some activity did that wasn't mine. I was somehow partially combined with another credit history, or something like that. I am not well versed in the technical details to truly understand what the problem was. I had to fill out some form to get it corrected and haven't thought about it since.

I’ve had entries show up on my credit report that were not mine, but my father’s in another city 750km away. I did not want his bill payment history mixed in with mine. At all.

It was actually more difficult to have them removed than you’d expect. I’m sure it is by design. You could start the process only after signing up for an online account, but the actual request needed to be made via fax.

Why'd that suck so much? As a software dev couldn't you just pay it off a month or two later?

That would depend on what car they bought.

I’m not sure what software devs make $15 grand a month in disposable income 2 years into their career, but I certainly was not one of them.

Some of the ones in the Bay Area do. Sometimes they don’t realize it’s not the norm.

Yeah, it's pretty common in the Bay. I did project that on wherever they're from.

I also didn't expect $15k-$30k in the jump from "not reliable" to "reliable" cars from somebody worried about a 20% interest rate over a long period of time. I have no idea what their background is, but even at today's prices you can do much better than that.

I dunno about you but my first car was when I was 16 working at Tim Hortons for minimum wage, long before I had a software developer salary...

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