> Unless you're taking out a mortgage tomorrow I don't really see why it matters.

Because it does? Apartments often do credit checks. Utilities run checks on you and require down payments for bills if your credit is too low. If you want a "nicer" credit card (Amex, for example), you have to have good credit. Starting a business and want a small business loan? They check your credit history if your business doesn't have a history. Etc..

Credit, at least in America, does matter. Can you get by without it? Of course. But having good credit is pretty easy to do and can have nice benefits.

The thing is, it's pretty much bound to be high as long as you don't do anything stupid. Good credit is nice, but it also takes zero effort for the most part.

That is true, but you also do have to take actions that generate that default good credit. In many cases no credit == bad credit. Hence the question OP asked.

Access to credit early can be a useful thing, and so getting a good score reasonably quickly can help. One of the interesting things we did was get our kids checking accounts when they were still in grade school. (its basic arithmetic to balance them so well within their capability) And this had an interesting consequence of giving them an early financial visibility to the credit markets. To be completely honest I don't know how that affected their scores but they were getting credit cards in college with real limits ($1,000 - $5,000) when their peers were not able to qualify for $500 cards.

Having a high credit score gives you an advantage that most underestimate. Whether you're competing for an apartment, a job, or anything else if you have an 800 credit score and the other person has a 550 credit score, you win.

Totally agree. We all obsess about the FICO score way too much. If you plan on living mostly debt free then usually you don't even have a need for a credit score. There are ways to get mortgages if you want one even if you don't have a credit history.

I was about the age of the original poster, and had lived debt-free, credit-card-free thus far, when I went to buy a mobile phone. The listed price was $100, but because I had such a low credit score, they were going to charge me a $500 deposit fee to buy the $100 phone.

It's totally possible to live without debt, but it seems curiously inconvenient to live without a good credit score.

Just to clarify, you were almost certainly not buying a $100 phone, but a $600 phone and two year contract with only $100 upfront.

You can easily buy an unlocked phone for full price, and use it on a prepaid service with no credit check.

It's been some years, so I don't recall exactly, but this is probably correct. Nevertheless, the point remains: my inadequate credit score mucked with my options here.

Your inadequate credit score prevented you from being able to get a form of debt. Nobody is arguing thats not true.

And yes, cell phone subsidies are a form of debt because you are paying back the price of the phone built into the 2 year contract. If you buy the phone upfront then you can go month to month without needing to be tied into a contract.

So my point is consistent, if you plan on living debt free, the FICO score is being given way to much attention.

This all makes sense. Regrettably, the Verizon salesman did not explain it to me this way, and presented it as a penalty due to my low credit score. It seemed believable, too, because it wasn't that interesting of a phone. This was in circa 2002; $100 seemed like a decent price for the phone I was trying to buy -- $600 did not.

Oh well. Thanks for your comment!

> There are ways to get mortgages if you want one even if you don't have a credit history.

I've never heard of this. Even if its possible, You will most likely pay a huge premium, if you want a lender to not use FICO scores to determine how risky of a client they're about to lend money to.

Wow, I guess my last post was unpopular here. Look into "Manual Underwriting" its definitely possible to get a mortgage without a FICO store.

My problem withe the FICO score is that it is not an indicator of financial stability. Its entirely based off of debt. If someone wants to live debt free, which most would argue is a great position to be in financially, you're actually punished by FICO. The system is broken, and everyones obsession with the FICO score just feeds that broken system.

If more people did things like Manual Underwriting, and tried to live debt free I think it would drastically help the entire system.

You'd think that someone who had regularly saved large chunks of their pay for years, and never got in any debt, would be a pretty safe person to give a mortgage to! Perhaps there's a gap in the market there. Or perhaps there aren't enough people like that to make it worthwhile? :)