Credit Rating: a classification of credit risk based on investigation of a potential customer’s financial resources

You’ve probably never thought of it—or maybe you have—but shall we refer to it today as “the big four questions?”

The answers to these questions determine your suitability, respectability and popularity in our society.

1. Are you skinny?
2. Are you wealthy?
3. Are you hip with the trends?

And question four:

Do you have a good credit rating?

We are so intense on question four that we have a number assigned to it, and that particular number determines whether you are considered to be “up and coming” or “down and trodden.”

While everyone is terribly concerned about racial inequality in this country, nobody is in the least troubled about the potential of judging another by turning to everyone and whispering, “He’s a 493…”

At that point, we are all supposed to understand that this person is either extraordinarily unlucky, a criminal or has absolutely no sense of what to do with a dollar bill.

Could there be a greater condemnation? After all, you can have black skin and put on a beautiful suit of clothes, walk into a room speaking great King’s English and even the white supremacists have to comment, “He’s one of the good ones.”

But if you walk in a room with a low credit score, it doesn’t matter what color your skin is, the condition of your clothes, your sparkling attitude or your smile.

You are a credit risk.

Therefore you are a social leper and a cultural bewilderment—similar to having financial AIDS.

That fact that this is the acceptable way we conduct business in this capitalistic climate does not seem to bother anyone.

There are many reasons you can have good credit.

There are even more reasons you can end up with bad credit.

I do not think we should do away with the system—but I think we should make sure that the system doesn’t do away with us.

 

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