General Discussion

We escaped bankruptcy by the thinnest of margins. At one point our home was days from foreclosure.

That's when I quit caring about credit ratings.

My wife recovered from the potentially deadly illness after more than a year of adverse side effects and misery from her treatments, fights with her insurance company, and a COBRA plan timing out. We haven't taken out any loans or used credit cards since.

Recently my wife bought a used car with cash and the unscrupulous dealer did an unnecessary credit check, probably hoping to upsell her to a new car, even though my wife knew exactly which car she wanted and had cash to pay for it. The authorization for a credit check was probably in the fine print of something my wife signed. A few days later we got a letter from a finance company saying they couldn't authorize an auto loan because we had no recent credit history.

Oh well.

When it comes to finances, I probably learned the wrong lesson from all this.