BAD CREDIT? NO JOB FOR YOU: The spread of credit scores into all aspects of your life continues. The NYT reports that half of all employers now check credit when making a hiring decision:
“Credit reports are really seeping into the soil,” said Sarah Ludwig, co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, a New York-based nonprofit. “It’s taken an outsized role in employment, housing and insurance.”
For those seeking a job, it can lead to what Chi Chi Wu, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston, calls “a bizarre, Kafkaesque experience.”
“Someone loses their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.”
Credit scores are developed using a very rigorous process and once deployed they are tested and maintained to make sure they still work. They have one job, which is to predict the relative likelihood of someone’s debt going bad. Credit scoring models are robust and they predicit delinquency very well. If memory serves, the odds of somebody going 90 days delinquent double with every 40 point reduction in your FICO.
Do credit scores do other jobs well too? Almost certainly, as it would be surprising if they had no correlation with anything else. How well can they predict other aspects of a person’s life? It depends on what you’re trying to predict.
What employers ought to do is put the use of credit scores to the test and actually check to see if credit scores have predictive validity. That is, they should pull applicants’ scores, then check their performance a year or two after the fact and see if they can find any patterns which credit scores explain and which are not explained by any other factors.
Of course, employers will never do this because employers are absolutely horrible at hiring people and have no interest in determining whether their theories are true. But that’s a topic for another day.
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TODAY’S STUDENT LOAN HORROR STORY: These things have been coming fast and furious lately:
I just paid $1,810 in student loans this month. I make on average around $1,500. That’s not counting another $500 monthly payment my parents make.
So, really, my student loans in total each month are $2,310 and rising. The only reasons I’m not broke is thanks to my tax return, that not all loans came out of deferral at the same time and that payment my parents make. Thankfully my parents allow me to live in their basement in Rochester, Minn., rent-free.
I work full-time at a job that I wouldn’t have required my college degree in sociology from Arizona State. This job pays above minimum wage; however, it is unlikely I’ll be able to advance further in this job. This job is mentally exhaustive to the point I couldn’t handle working another job, whether part- or full-time. It’s hard to go to work realizing that, in a sense, I’m working without pay — because all my income pays my loans.
…At 27, I am a slave to my student loans with no end in sight. I owe more than $160,000.
All of which stinks, but two comments. First of all, you paid $160,000 for a sociology degree? I understand that kids make bad decisions, but wow.
Second, we obviously don’t have all the information and perhaps there are mitigating circumstances, but her comment about the job being so “mentally exhaustive” that she can’t get even another part-time job smacks of a poor attitude. We work a full-time job AND have three small kids AND publish a blog five days a week, so nuts to that. Some folks dwell in self-built prisons.
RICH FOLK GAMING THE SYSTEM AT DISNEY: Some enterprising moms, who also seem to be horrible human beings, have figured out how to game the system at Disney. The article’s headline, “Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney world,” sums up the whole thing pretty well, but here’s an excerpt anyway:
Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.
The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.
“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” crowed one mom, who hired a disabled guide through Dream Tours Florida.
“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”
…Not only is their “black-market tour guide” more efficient than Disney World’s VIP Tours, it’s cheaper, too.
Disney Tours offers a VIP guide and fast passes for $310 to $380 per hour.
We probably haven’t been paying enough attention to Disney, but it was news to us that they offer VIP guides and ride-skipping privileges to rich people. Here’s the VIP link for our high-rolling readers.
Disney never explicitly claimed to be an egalitarian paradise where everybody’s equal before The Mouse, so we’re not faulting them for anything, but we suppose the Kingdom’s more magical for some than for others, yes? We can’t help but be reminded of the Onion article about Platinum Plus preferred citizenship.
The reason employers continue to discriminate, using credit, social media, and other means is because job applicants fail to sue the bastards.
If we all got smart, we would sue prospective employers if they do not hire you. Here is why. You allow discrimination to continue. Instead, I like a system where your local state tests you on your skills and gives you a grade. An employer will then go to the state to look for staff. The next available applicant with a passing grade is sent to you. If you fire them, you pay 2 years severance pay. This would make it fair to all and help monitor the need for H1B visas. I bet you we do no need H1B visas at all.
I have finally smartened up and started suing employers for social media discrimination. I have found you can make more money applying for jobs, than actually working at one. I hate that it has come down to this, but, I need to make a living. Every person has a right to make a decent living. No employer should be allowed to discriminate, under any circumstance. Instead, they need to learn to manage better and treat their employees the way they want to be treated.
Now, if a given employee is a terrorist and tries to beat the system, he/she will not be able to. Co-workers will be randomly asked to rate their co-workers on a quarterly basis. It will be random and there is no way to prepare for that. If you are a chronic problem, you will be called out.
Credit should not be allowed to be used for employment purposes, except in very few instances. Only loan officers should have credit pulled.