May 28, 2019
If you were to do a search online to find out the average credit score in the United States, you would find that it is somewhere around 700. And if you work with credit reports, you might be surprised by that number, probably thinking it is too high.
And if you did, you would be right. Here’s why.
As on July 1, 2018 the US Census Bureau estimated the US Population at about 327 million people with about 253 million adults.
Experian says that 34% of these adults have bad credit, which is anything below a 670 score. That comes out to 86 million people with bad credit. But they are not counting another large group of people. The group I am talking about includes those who have no credit score at all.
This group is estimated at 50 million people. Since they have no score at all, they are not included in the calculation of the average credit score. They are not being counted at all.
But if you combine these people with the 86 million who have bad credit, the total number of people who have bad credit or no credit comes to 136 million people. This is almost 54% of the adults in the United States.
In other words, more than half the adults in our country either have bad credit or no credit. So if you are reading this, it is more likely than not that you either have some credit issues, have had some or will have some at a later date. It also means that you probably know someone who is having credit difficulties right now.
Obviously, this is not ideal but there is a solution to it. Just like in any other game we play in life, one must know the rules in order to win at that game. This applies to sports, board games, jobs, relationships and money, among other things.
Unfortunately, we were not taught anything about credit in school and most of our parents didn’t know much about it so they couldn’t teach us either. Credit education is vital but is not being done.
This put all of us at a disadvantage and opened the door for us to make mistakes that could cost us a lot of money.
Even though our parents didn’t teach us about credit, we really can’t blame them. Most of them were already using credit before credit scores were commonly used. There was no information available to them so it is now up to us to educate ourselves and our children so that they can have the opportunity to do better and make less mistakes than we have made.
Most people don’t really know what to do when they start worrying about credit and the first action they take to fix it is some sort of credit repair. This is the expensive way to do it and it rarely works as well as it needs to work.
This is the purpose of this site: to educate the public on the subject of credit so that they know the rules of the game and so they don’t waste money as a result of not knowing.
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