Check Your Credit

[Nishu]

Even if you're on a cash only plan, it's silly to ignore your credit report. Getting turned down for employment because of bad credit is a real possibility. They check your credit when they turn on utilities or services like cable, and if your credit is messed up you'll at least have to pay a deposit and you might not even be able to get it turned on.

We do'nt plan on using credit again after we pay down our debt, but part of our plan for being financially prepared is to be ready for absolutely anything. That includes having decent credit. At the very least, I want accurate credit. I'm not about to stand by and let criminals ruin my good name without a fight.

I would also be concerned about the possibility that if my husband and I passed away, the creditors who think I owe them would be able to sue our estate.

We use experian credit monitoring through usaa. My husband is military so we put an active duty alert on his credit report and I plan to keep it there till he's out. We also put fraud alerts on our reports on a regular basis. Once because our credit card information got stolen and they ran up about 3k in charges, and then again when we had a virus that allowed someone to get some of our login info.

[llamalluv]

I think you are grasping at straws here. Bad credit has never kept me from getting a job, and I had more than one $300 discharged debt on my credit report. I had a foreclosure and late payments on a credit card and an erroneous collection account (I had done business with the company, but they fraudulently reported my account as being closed with a balance due to them, when it was due to me).

Also, you cannot maintain "decent" credit without using credit. If you stopped using credit today, and paid everything off, in 7-10 years as everything aged off, you would have a 0 FICO.

[Nishu]

I think you are grasping at straws here. Bad credit has never kept me from getting a job, and I had more than one $300 discharged debt on my credit report. I had a foreclosure and late payments on a credit card and an erroneous collection account (I had done business with the company, but they fraudulently reported my account as being closed with a balance due to them, when it was due to me).

Also, you cannot maintain "decent" credit without using credit. If you stopped using credit today, and paid everything off, in 7-10 years as everything aged off, you would have a 0 FICO.

Having an empty credit report is better than having several open, delinquent accounts in collections. That's exactly what will happen if someone steals your identity and uses it to open fraudulent accounts.

If my husband's credit tanked, he'd get fired. His work requires a security clearance and they pull his credit on a regular basis. Any job that he gets from here on out will likely have the same requirements.

Recent statistics are scarce, but when the Society for Human Resource Management polled its members in 2006, 43% of their companies ran credit checks on some or all potential hires. That was up from 25% in 1998.

How bad credit can cost you a job - MSN Money

It's one thing to reject the use of credit on principle, but to intentionally avoid checking it is just reckless. It makes absolutely no sense. Your credit report isn't just going to disappear because you don't like it.

[llamalluv]

Having an empty credit report is better than having several open, delinquent accounts in collections. That's exactly what will happen if someone steals your identity and uses it to open fraudulent accounts.

If my husband's credit tanked, he'd get fired. His work requires a security clearance and they pull his credit on a regular basis. Any job that he gets from here on out will likely have the same requirements.



How bad credit can cost you a job - MSN Money

It's one thing to reject the use of credit on principle, but to intentionally avoid checking it is just reckless. It makes absolutely no sense. Your credit report isn't just going to disappear because you don't like it.

You are arguing against a point I never made. Never have I said it's fine to ignore identity theft. What I said was that you do not need good credit to buy stuff for cash.