I disagree, if you have a terrible credit history, leasing to you may be very risky. They aren't loaning you money, but they are trusting that you will have the money every month to pay them with.

Even more importantly than that: the lessor gives the lessee custody and (limited) care-taking responsibilities over what, in most cases, represents a significant investment of capital.

it's me, the tenant, who is loaning money to my landlord.

I don't really understand why, but it's way easier to get a credit card with no history if you are in college. People who would easily be approved as a senior in college will get denied 12 months later. It's stupid that it works this way, but some of the best financial advice you can give a college student is "get a credit card before you graduate."

> 4. Prevent employers from pulling credit history. Your finances are not their business.

This resonates intuitively with a lot of people (myself included), and is actually the law in 11 states. There are some interesting subtleties that should be considered before making up your mind though. In brief, the practical impact can make things _worse_ for some demographics often assumed to benefit from this type of legislation. A mass market article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/23/the-l...

The original research: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shoag/files/no_more_credit_...

> 5. Prevent landlords from pulling credit history. They are not loaning you money.

If all goes well, they aren't loaning you money. However, in most states it takes at least a couple of months to lawfully evict a non-paying tenant. So landlords are implicitly offering to loan tenants a few months rent.

I think the actuary-types who design the scoring models would disagree vehemently with this one. Scoring models are built from regressions on actual default rates.

It's one thing to say "I see you've been late on a few of your car payments, so we're going to give a higher interest rate." and it's something else to say "You have a few unpaid medical bills/late CC payments so we're going to give you a higher interest rate on this car loan."

I just have a hard time really believing that is the case. Often credit issuers simply look at the totality of everything, instead of appropriately looking the history of the specific financial contract they're wanting to issue.

That doesn't mean that systematic failures can't happen, but they're pretty unlikely. It's much more likely that you underestimate the correlation between these disparate defaults than that the banks overestimate it.

This quite literally happens already.

How many cards do you have? I understand it's mostly theoretical but I'm wondering why would anyone want to use their high-interest credit card to borrow even a few tens of thousands? Or any high-interest vehicle of debt for that much money, for that matter.

>but I'm wondering why would anyone want to use their high-interest credit card to borrow even a few tens of thousands?

I don't know, but I'm sure as heck not going to utilize them that much! I am sure the credit issuers wish I did though.

Some credit cards have promotional low or no interest rates for a year or so. You can then balance transfer to another promotional rate card at the end of the year. Also many issuers (Barclaycard, AMEX, Capital One) have low or no interest rates for active duty military.

Here are a couple ideas: lawyer fees during a contested divorce and emergency spending from being out of work too long.

I never understood this - why is someone else asking for your credit history a ding on your credit report? It seems really silly to me, but I must be missing something.

Inquiries only affect your credit when they're from someone whom you've authorized to pull your credit as a potential creditor: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/finance/credit-report-soft-h...