Why I hate America.
January 12th, 2005 | by Scott Jennings |I don’t know if I’m telling tales out of school here, but the way we handle credit in this country is seriously fucked.
Look, I don’t care if I can’t “sign and drive,” I don’t care if I don’t get the 0.0% APR, I don’t care if I can’t reap all the benefits of the “Sale-A-Bration.” You can keep the dancing mascots to yourself. All I want is to buy a clean and reliable car and make payments on it. And I want the financing process to be expeditious and dignified.
I dropped $25 the other day to pull my credit reports from the full triopoly of credit agencies, and I got about what I expected: eight pages detailing the horror story of my student loans and about $3000 in defaulted credit card debt. No mentions of the fact that I’ve been paying off the student loans for the past six months, no hint that the credit card debt has been transferred and is being paid — those original accounts defaulted, and there they sit. The clean accounts with the little green “OK” icons have yet to make their appearance.
Also not mentioned on my credit report: I’ve never been even an hour late on any rent payment in the five years since college. Ditto for utility payments. Of course, every landlord and utility company checks my credit and mumbles low noises and makes me put up huge deposits, but the fact that I’m no problem at all to them never gets to the record. (Of course, rent and utilities aren’t really “credit” transactions, but I have the strong feeling that if I were 30 days delinquent on those payments, I’d have little red “30″ icons on my report.)
So because of all of this, my financing application for a car couldn’t be approved today, even though the affable British man from the local Ford dealership didn’t indicate the possibility of a problem after he ran my credit and gave me a call. I plugged my information into a website, it was sent to him, he couldn’t wait for me to get down there. I saw his credit inquiry on my report, so I know he knew what my story was.
He was nice enough to give me a ride back to my office after the news came back that my application would have to be reviewed by a human being, delaying the processing until tomorrow or so. I’m not always correct on my vibes, but the one I picked up was “well, I’ve wasted my morning, I’ll never see this deadbeat again.”
I’m not a deadbeat. I’m a smart man who made several mistakes when he was younger and then found himself in no position to recover from those mistakes for a long time. And now I’m a wiser man who makes enough money to afford his apartment and his electricity and his digital cable and his debt payments and a nice car on top of that — provided someone will loan me the money for the nice car.
I’m not asking for sympathy; this is a cautionary tale. Don’t use credit cards in college, especially if you’re not earning enough money to cover what you’re spending. The Department of Education is the most flexible creditor on the planet, so work with them immediately, let them know your circumstances, and don’t try to hide from them. Don’t let any of your creditors lose touch with you, even if you have no money for them. You’ll thank yourself in five years, when you’re not sitting in the dirty back waiting room of a car dealership after effectively begging for a relatively small loan with downright usurious terms.
