Ready for something that might shock you?
Around one in five American adults do not have credit scores.
The Consumer Financial Protection bureau refers to people without credit scores as being credit
invisible. Being credit invisible means that you do not have credit history. Beyond that, 19 million
more consumers do not have credit records that common credit scoring models can use to
create scores.
Navigating modern society without a credit record can be extremely difficult, as credit scores are
used to make lending decisions with insurance providers, who use scores to determine
consumer risks. Obtaining a loan without a credit score is next to impossible.
More often than not, landlords will use credit scores to evaluate whether a prospective tenant is
worthy of renting to or not. Employers often pull the credit reports of prospective employees to
determine whether they are worthy of hiring or not.
Consumers with credit invisibility often face serious obstacles when trying to apply for housing,
insurance, loans, utilities, or unemployment.
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What Is Credit Invisibility?
In 2015, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a report surrounding credit
invisibility. The report was based on nationally representative data and used anonymized credit
reports of more than five million consumers, which were purchased through one of the major
credit bureaus.
In the report, the CFPB found that over 188 million consumers, making up more than 80% of the
United States’ adult population, had credit records with at least one of the major credit bureaus.
Those records contained sufficient information that made them scorable.
On the other side, 8.3% of adult consumers had credit records that could not be used by typical
scoring models to generate credit scores. This group of consumers contains those who did not
have enough recent credit history for scoring or those who did not have enough information on
their credit reports to gain a score.
The last 11% of the bunch are what the bureaus refer to as “credit invisible,” meaning there are
no credit records with any of the credit reporting bureaus.
The major disadvantages to being credit invisible include:
● Credit becomes very expensive
● Housing becomes very difficult to find
● Insurance becomes harder to obtain
While credit invisibility impacts a wide range of Americans, it often impacts certain groups of
people more than others. The groups most likely to be credit invisible or unscorable include:
● Black and Hispanic consumers
● Consumers 18 to 24 years of age
● Consumers in rural areas
While the journey to becoming credit visibility will require serious structural changes in the
country to address credit inequality, there are ways in which credit invisible individuals can
access good credit for personal growth. One way in which many consumers are looking to
generate better credit is through authorized user tradelines.
If you are interested in learning more about tradelines, make sure to get in touch with us here at
Personal Tradelines! We look forward to helping you get your credit to where you’ve dreamed of
having it.
