Beater car loan as a credit boost?

Otto Maddox wrote: In reply to Josh: I wish I was just buying someone else a house instead of buying one for myself that lost $100K in value in a blink of an eye. And I live in area where property wasn't hit that hard.

I'm not necessarily endorsing buying yourself a house, but I highly recommend letting other people buy you one .

curtis73 wrote: At the time of being denied the secured visa, they sent me a copy of my credit report because I didn't think they should have denied it. I wanted to check up on it and make sure it was correct. Of all the scores (all bureaus, two people) the lowest score was 698, the highest was 782. That was two weeks ago. I average mid 7's, my wife high 7's... mostly because a few of the household bills are in her name only. They cited something like "insufficient history" as the reason for denial.

It might just be that you don't fit their profile (whatever that profile is) and the "insufficient history" line was trotted out. "Insufficient history" can simply mean that you're not in debt up to your eyeballs and thus not viewed as a profitable target.

I don't know how you got a high score without a history for 10 years. That is supposed to be impossible, but then again it's supposed to be impossible to have a credit score below 400 and I had a 125 credit score for almost 6 months. They all admitted it was impossible but it took the office of the Attorney General to get it cleared up. I jumped 700 points in one day.

The good thing about being denied for insufficient history is that shows the bank is thinking and not blindly just using credit scores to determine creditworthiness. That's the place to go back to to get a loan later. They will look at the whole situation and not just at your scores.

While it worked against you this time, it will work for you in the future.

carguy123 wrote: I don't know how you got a high score without a history for 10 years. That is supposed to be impossible,

Paying bills I suspect.

Recently we added our names to her Dad's credit cards to at least populate the report. His credit is mid 800s

curtis73 wrote:

carguy123 wrote: I don't know how you got a high score without a history for 10 years. That is supposed to be impossible,

Paying bills I suspect. Recently we added our names to her Dad's credit cards to at least populate the report. His credit is mid 800s

Paying your bills would matter IF YOU HAD ANY BILLS BEING REPORTED TO THE CREDIT BUREAU, but you said you hadn't had credit for 10 years. So what bills are you paying?

If you truly haven't had any credit in 10 years that means there was no recent data on the credit bureau and therefore no way to get and maintain a credit score.

Adding your names to her Dad's credit cards, presuming they are also reporting on your report, is what will drive your credit score. It's like being back in school, you can't get a score for a test you didn't take - unless your teacher made a misteak and entered a score on the wrong line in the grade book.

The credit bureaus make mistakes. They make them all the time. One newspaper article I read said that over 80% of all credit bureaus reports had mistakes on them. Based upon the reports I see I'd say that it's a rare credit bureau report that doesn't have a mistake that affects credit scores.

I love it when people write misteak. Yum. Misteak.