Of lenders, borrowers and political hacks

Image: CBC


Of lenders, borrowers and political hacks

Never a borrower nor a lender, nor a politician be.

Polonius:
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. Hamlet Act 1, scene 3

Husbandry is a quaint but apt word for good money and life management. It's simple really: just make the very best of what you have, and be willing to learn new skills and recreate yourself more than once over your lifetime to ensure a good place in the job market. Make yourself indispensible in whatever job you hold -- unlike politicians who depend on mere popularity and quotable bon mots and end up with mere money from the pockets of tax payers and government debt practises.

Borrowing is a very slippery slope:

CBC: Why 4 websites give you 4 different credit scores — and none is the number most lenders actually see
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• The free [access] websites, Borrowell and Credit Karma, purchase the scores they provide to consumers from Equifax and TransUnion, respectively, yet all four companies share a different score with a different proprietary name.
• We spoke with multiple lenders in the financial, automotive and mortgage sectors, who all said they would not accept any of the scores our participants received from the four websites.
• The score that most Canadian lenders use is called a FICO score, previously known as the Beacon score. FICO, which is a U.S. company, sells its score to both Equifax and TransUnion. FICO says 90 per cent of Canadian lenders use it, including major banks.
•  But Canadian consumers cannot access their FICO score on their own.

Those companies break all the laws of privacy and credibility and, for that reason alone, should be abolished. We need a few school kids to spend their Fridays on the streets with placards, hollering about the sleaziness of it all.  Especially since Equifax itself suffered a hack not long ago, one of the worst in size and scope, and heaven only knows who's got your info now.

• Mortgage broker Vince Gaetano offered to do a hard credit check for Agarwal, as if he was applying for a loan, so he could learn his FICO score.
• Agarwal took him up on the offer and was stunned to learn his FICO score was 829 — nearly 200 points higher than the lowest score he received online.
• "Oh my god!" Agarwal said when he heard the news. "I am really happy, but totally surprised."

How can this guy be "really happy" that a bunch of companies know all about him and can literally make stuff up about him that could make or break him?  I'm surprised that he's so desperate for approval he doesn't mind all these companies having his personal information, regardless of what rating they toss out of their hats at him.

This guy should not overlook that Equifax was hacked, and that far more entities have his (mis)information now than he could ever have imagined. The CBC article goes on to say:

• Equifax and TransUnion did say their scores are used by lenders, but they wouldn't name any, citing proprietary reasons.

Oh, wow, they have selective scruples!

• Doug Hoyes, co-founder of Hoyes, Michalos and Associates Inc., one of the largest personal insolvency firms in Canada, was also surprised by the disparity between Agarwal's FICO score and the other scores he'd received.
• Hoyes said consumers are trying too hard to have the perfect credit score. The fact is, some activities that could boost a credit score, such as getting a new credit card or taking on a loan, aren't necessarily the best financial decisions.

Lenders have been preaching forever that being in debt improves your credit rating, and apparently no one considered the source of that self-serving advice. And here's the kicker:

DigitalTrends: How to find out if you were a victim of the Equifax hack

• The best way to find out if you were affected by the hack is to use Equifax’s “Potential Impact” tool. Available directly from Equifax’s own site, it asks you to input your last name and the last six digits of your social security number.
• Some have pointed out that the tool does appear to work better at some times rather than others.

Help, I can't stop my sardonic laughter.  The very company that lied to you about your score, shared it with other companies who also lie, and had such poor security that it was able to be hacked, is the company you have to trust to tell you whether or not you've been personally affected by the hack!  Well, I, personally, was not born yesterday.

You know, a Canadian politician has been criticized, and well she ought to be, for calling people who didn't vote for her "stupid", but now I'm beginning to think she may have accidentally made a correct assessment of the overall acuity of the general population after being brainwashed by the so-called financial "experts".

This is going to sound weird, because I'm not terribly deep into the popular "spiritual" stuff, but I think people are basically rudderless, rather than hopelessly stupid. They've been taught to obey authority, "experts", and just about everybody in business today, in our schools, in our governments qualify as such. We Canadians, supposedly a free country, still recognize an old lady in England as our "monarch" and would be expected to bow, as if before God, if ever in her vicinity.

We really do need to take a look inside and listen to own own inner practical knowledge, instinct, sniffer if you like, and give that a go for a change. Talk to the animals, maybe. They know how to avoid predators.

Sadly, our politicians rely on the International credit rating outfits:

CBC: Why Trudeau should be more humble about his credit rating brag

• ...the toxic mortgage securities that triggered the last global recession were almost all rated AAA until they proved to be worthless junk. 
• Canada is among the handful of nations that enjoy unanimous AAA status, but it's more a case of being the best of a bad bunch than the star status that Trudeau claims.

It's your quality of life at stake here, not that of the politicians who step down hugely more wealthy than when they stepped up.

Trudeau, don't forget, was no sooner voted into office than he gave millions of Canadian dollars to the Clinton Foundation and recently gifted the news media with $600 million, and ... 

NatPost: MPs, senators get pay hike as Canadians struggle with stagnant wages, rising unemployment

• The 338 MPs will see their salaries rise to $170,400 from $167,400, while Trudeau — who gets another $170,400 as PM — now will make $340,800, an increase of $6,000.

​Now you know why so many deadbeats run for Parliament.  Read the rest of the NatPost article if you don't mind a risk of ending up with curly toes.

There are some exceptions but we hardly ever hear about people running for office just so that we get to hear some different ideas.  Here's "the lazy voter's guide" and here's the complete list of the 21, count 'em, parties participating in this upcoming election.

It's not my fault that the CBC chose to feature only two, and focus largely on the Marxist/Lenninist one:

CBC: 'It's not really about winning' say fringe party candidates about upcoming federal election

They have to say that because there's no chance in Hades that they'll win, but maybe some of what they have to say could be refreshing and informative - even inspiring!  I might decide to take a closer look at the long list this weekend and, if I see anything interesting, I'll probably talk about it.

In the meantime, think about whether or not you really need to wrack up a pile of debts in order to improve your ability to wrack up debts.
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