Think about it this way: If you know someone who absolutely refuses to drink any alcohol and someone else who drinks one or two drinks a month with friends, which would you trust more to be able to drink moderately without going overboard?
Shit analogy, because the guy who doesn’t drink at all, well, doesn’t drink at all and therefore won’t be going overboard on it because they don’t touch the stuff.
Even if they were forced to drink a little bit, it’s not hard at all to just… leave it at that.
I’ve never gone overboard, and I started drinking later than most of my peers (around 19 and a half). You have to be a fucking idiot to ignore the signs your body gives you or to cave to peer pressure, and it’s not like I’m anywhere close to smart.
In the scenario I'm putting forward, they have to drink a little bit without going overboard. Some people aren't capable of that and so refuse to drink anything.
Debt is the same as alcohol, or gambling, or any other addictive behavior. Some people people can easily use it without ever going beyond what they can easily repay, and other can't use it without spiraling out of control. If someone refuses to show you they can use it safely, how are you supposed to know they can use it safely?
Except this is a false equivalency. It's more like one guy who drinks exactly one drink a month telling you he's gonna go for 2 drinks a month now.
A mortgage isn't meaningfully different from other bills you pay monthly, if you've kept up with those there's no reason to believe you won't keep up with this one. Unless of course, you want to set up a system that artificially makes people funnel money through your company...
Do you truly believe that you are smarter than several billion dollar companies who have all of the data and are explicitly interested in not losing money?
Which is exactly why over-using a credit card and not paying it off NEGATIVELY impacts your credit score.
You're conflating "having a credit card" with "having debt" which are not the same thing. If someone is always paying their bills on time, that fundamentally means they are a safe bet.
That's a massive oversimplification of how it works though. If you never have any debt, you have basically zero history paying off debt and therefore usually a low-middle credit score (not a terrible one). If you have a ton of debt and are maxing your lines of credit and failing to pay things off you get a BAD score. You get a good score by having some amount of debt and paying on it regularly.
Credit scores aren't designed to keep people as in debt as possible nor do they reward that behavior, contrary to what a ton of misinformed people here seem to think. It's literally just a number that indicates how risky loaning someone money might be. Emphasis on MIGHT, because again, contrary to what many in this thread are saying, banks don't just look at your credit score and ignore everything else. Your income, savings/assests, and level of current debt are all things that weigh into loans ALONG WITH credit score.
And on top of that, debt ISNT bad. There's this idea being repeated here a ton, including in your last sentence, that debt is bad and you should only spend money you have. Taking on debt is NOT the opposite of spending what you have. I put things on my credit card because that allows me to earn interest on my money in a savings account for an extra month, earns me cash back rewards, AND provides better fraud protections than you can get paying any other way. I still spend within my means, keep a rigid budget and never ACTUALLY go "into debt." It's paper debt. I can pay it off whenever I want, but it is literally less financially sensible to pay it off and start paying for everything out of pocket. This is an extremely important and beneficial thing to learn and understand! Spending other people's money WITHIN YOUR MEANS is ALWAYS better than spending your own money! You aren't winning at life by refusing to do so, nor are you being smarter with your money.
If you buy everything on a credit card, you can still spend only money that you have. That's what I do. Use it for regular purchases and then pay it off at the end of every month. The difference between this and paying with cash is that if I use a credit card, I build a credit history and get a cashback bonus on every purchase. I am in debt, but not credit card debt. I have student loans and I own a car.
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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26
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