Credit score is hilarious. Until I was like 30 I paid for literally everything with cash. Everything. Never missed a bill. My credit report/score came back "unreportable." Not a shred of data to go off of. I was unable to obtain any credit card. I ultimately had to go to a bank and place $1500 in what was basically a 0% CD for the duration of my credit card, with the agreement my bank would just take it if I didn't pay. After a couple of years of paying that religiously they allowed me to unsecure the funds, but I still had shitty credit afterwards.

Every new immigrant has that problem. I deposited $500 in a credit union and took a secured loan of $500 for 2 years. Did the same at another bank. Also took a secured credit card, as parent comment described. That bumped my credit score up pretty quickly.

Dave Ramsey talks a lot about that - to have a good credit score you’ve got to take on debt, which is counterproductive for a lot of people.

The IQ test does not have egalitarian roots, it was simply a tool designed to diagnose people with severe learning disabilities and was later abused to give a metric to people to feel smug about themselves. It doesn't have significant correlation with any meaningful success metric as soon as we disregard the people with learning disabilities.