topic Re: How much does age matter in General Credit Topics

How much does age matter

MeCasa — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:04:59 GMT

I've had a battle plan where I have been paying down debt and palnning to borrow unsecured $50,000. My score is up to 773 but now I'm starting to think they may not lend me money because of my age, I'm 70. I know there is no set answer but ya'll know more about this so your opinions mtter to me.

Re: How much does age matter

Slabenstein — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:14:22 GMT

There is a set answer: per the ECOA, lenders cannot discriminate on the basis of age.

Re: How much does age matter

CreditPoor — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:15:46 GMT

Unfortunately, age does play a factor with underwriting. Average age life expectancy of men is around 74, so the question will be asked "Can this person reasonably pay this loan off with the interest at 70?"

Your DTI and income will heavily be scrutinized and as much as I hate to say this 50k loan is probably very unlikely

Re: How much does age matter

Slabenstein — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:19:35 GMT

@CreditPoor wrote:
Unfortunately, age does play a factor with underwriting. Average age life expectancy of men is around 74, so the question will be asked "Can this person reasonably pay this loan off with the interest at 70?"

Your DTI and income will heavily be scrutinized and as much as I hate to say this 50k loan is probably very unlikely

If you know of a lender where age is considered in underwriting, OP should apply there and take advantage of the civil liability that lender has opened themselves up to.

Re: How much does age matter

CreditPoor — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:25:13 GMT

Obviously law states age can't be a reason for denial, but if you're foolish enough to believe that age wouldn't be considered as a factor in determining whether or not to loan or not, well that's just naive.

Re: How much does age matter

Horseshoez — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:37:24 GMT

Some folks say age is a factor (legal or otherwise), others say it isn't allowed to happen. I'm 67 and have seen exactly zero evidence of my age being a factor in any of the applications I've done over the last year or two and said applications include a car, four credit cards, and a mortgage. Among my peer group I have yet to hear from a single person who indicated they were denied credit because of their age.

Re: How much does age matter

CreditPoor — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:49:29 GMT

Banks typically consider several factors when evaluating a loan application, including credit score, income, debt-to-income ratio, and overall financial health. While age itself is not a disqualifying factor, being 70 years old can influence the decision, particularly if the loan term extends significantly beyond life expectancy.

Lenders will assess the ability to repay the loan based on your current income, assets, and possibly your retirement savings.

Re: How much does age matter

Slabenstein — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:18:28 GMT

@CreditPoor wrote:
Banks typically consider several factors when evaluating a loan application, including credit score, income, debt-to-income ratio, and overall financial health. While age itself is not a disqualifying factor, being 70 years old can influence the decision, particularly if the loan term extends significantly beyond life expectancy.

Lenders will assess the ability to repay the loan based on your current income, assets, and possibly your retirement savings.

I can't speak for every lender out there, but the places I've worked take the ECOA very seriously. A lending decision being "influenced" by an ECOA-protected category would probably result in the person who made that decision losing their job.

Re: How much does age matter

CreditPoor — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:30:38 GMT

Think about it this way. You are the lender and a 70 year old man with very little savings, high DTI, recent debt, limited retirement savings and little to no collateral asks you for 50k....You know life expectancy for a man is 74, would you loan your money?

if I was a lender in this situation, I'd be thinking this person is looking to cash out and move to the Philippines and live out his golden years and my moneys gone. There is simply way more risk on the lenders side with really no upside to this loan.

Re: How much does age matter

FlaDude — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:41:37 GMT

@CreditPoor wrote:
Unfortunately, age does play a factor with underwriting. Average age life expectancy of men is around 74, so the question will be asked "Can this person reasonably pay this loan off with the interest at 70?"

Average life expectancy in the US for males at birth is almost 74, but the OP is already 70 so according to the SSA actuarial table, can expect to live almost 14 more years if male, 16 if female (on average).

SSA Actuarial Table

Re: How much does age matter

CreditPoor — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:49:05 GMT

Point is banks consider age when lending, whether we feel that's right or not. Algorithms factor in age all the time, as in why does a 40yr old man not have a car loan, mortgage and 1 year of credit history in lots of examples

Re: How much does age matter

Horseshoez — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 17:31:57 GMT

@CreditPoor wrote:
Think about it this way. You are the lender and a 70 year old man with very little savings, high DTI, recent debt, limited retirement savings and little to no collateral asks you for 50k....You know life expectancy for a man is 74, would you loan your money?

if I was a lender in this situation, I'd be thinking this person is looking to cash out and move to the Philippines and live out his golden years and my moneys gone. There is simply way more risk on the lenders side with really no upside to this loan.

I would argue regardless of age such an applicant for a loan would be a very questionable approval. Said another way, long before age was even considered, such an application would have been denied.

Re: How much does age matter

MeCasa — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 18:18:00 GMT

Not a bad idea, just trying to lower some high interest credit card debt. I'm house rich and cash poor.

Re: How much does age matter

Horseshoez — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 19:09:15 GMT

@MeCasa wrote:
Not a bad idea, just trying to lower some high interest credit card debt. I'm house rich and cash poor.

Given you are house rich, does it make sense for you to go for a HELOC? I would think that would give you much better chances of approval, a lower interest rate, and a tax deduction on the interest paid for the loan.

Re: How much does age matter

IsambardPrince — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 21:17:20 GMT

@Slabenstein wrote:
There is a set answer: per the ECOA, lenders cannot discriminate on the basis of age.

Yeah, so instead of open age discrimination, you get "Who knows what the real reason even was?"

Like in employment, housing, and other areas of civil rights law.

The only thing passing civil rights laws does is makes the people you deal with come up with a reason for the denial that you can't do anything about.

Re: How much does age matter

IsambardPrince — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:14:20 GMT

@CreditPoor wrote:
Point is banks consider age when lending, whether we feel that's right or not. Algorithms factor in age all the time, as in why does a 40yr old man not have a car loan, mortgage and 1 year of credit history in lots of examples

Few people should have a mortgage. Almost nobody should have a car loan or fleece. Some of them pay it off. Many of them fall over and end up in court (being sued or bankruptcy). Loans are tricky in that they make people stupid. They make people stupid by enabling them to spend money they won't have for 30 years and maybe they won't ever have it.

As to age, I would NOT loan a lot of money to a 70 year old man who is heavily in debt with few assets. No sir. And many people who reach this age just let themselves go because they don't plan to be around to clean up the mess. They see their impending death as "the discharge". They leave their kids to deal with an estate that has less than nothing.

My mother has a bunch of maxed up credit cards that she's tossing minimum "Don't sue me this month." payments to. She has no plans to better herself, and she's content with letting everything fall apart and land wherever it does because she doesn't think she has long to live. Earlier this year she started to seriously neglect her own health and it got so bad that I almost had to file a case with Adult Protective Services and have the police look in on her. Thankfully, I found my uncle and got him to convince her to go to a doctor. She was threatening to hide the full extent of her illness while she had not eaten in a month and couldn't make it down the stairs to go to the bathroom. She said she'd "force herself to look okay" and then "never speak to [me] again". Which if that had gone on much longer, would have only been two or three weeks.

For the younger people, a loan is how to throw money in the trash on bank interest and taxes, and that's about it. Then you congratulate yourself on owning something that's worth 60% less in five years. That's how car loans work. Car loans are so bad for most people that they easily exceed mechanic's bills in interest and depreciation.

Or you can "trade it" and get a complete insult. If they give you a good trade-in offer, they'll adjust the deal somewhere else to take it from you there. There is no such thing as a free lunch....at a car dealership, or bank.

That's why the only people who trade in a car are not brilliant to say the least, or are off-fleece, or so wealthy they don't care what the dealer gave them for it, or "this car has a lot of problems and the only way to slip it past anyone is offer it to Carvana".

My mom bought a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP off the lot, brand new. Several months in, she was at a stop light and someone slammed into the back of it. The insurance paid the repair shop, but the car developed all sorts of behaviors. Like the back windows rolled down but not up, and the transmission never acted right after that.

She said her and her second husband pushed the windows up with their hands and traded the car in at the dealer for a 2003 Impala and the dealership never even checked it and paid them trade-in value on a 9 month old car.

I will give her this. What she lacks in generalized intelligence, she makes up for with sheer lack of conscience. Someone was going to eat that piece of crap and by God it wasn't going to be her. Unfortunately, her score with car dealers are 1 "getting that piece of crap past them in the finance room" and several "I bought a car that was repaired with Bondo and headlight restoration kits and paid twice what they were worth and financed them at 'mafia interest' with something called Credit Acceptance Corporation which is probably every bit as bad as it sounds."

Sadly, her bankruptcy was packed with mortgages and bad car loans and credit cards and personal loans and tax debt that was racked up when she was working her butt off to enable exes 2 and 3 who lived off her, drank her money, smoked her money, and made her pay to remodel both houses that she lost in divorce while beating her up and cheating on her.

There's a moral to the story, and that is, she spent her earlier years doing everyone wrong and cheating on my dad and ripping him off in divorce court and setting my life up for tragedy and failure, and it didn't work out well for her because she was so blinded by the pursuit of her own selfish evil that it rebounded upon her and she merely lost 20 years of her life and most of her retirement savings.

So I'm assuming that someone bought it and had a lot of issues thinking they got a great deal on a car that was about a year old, at least at first.

Body shops can do amazing work. They can make a smashed up car look brand new again, but it doesn't mean it will work right.

Not having a recent history of installment or mortgage loans and you're 40 means that you've pulled the credit report of a person who knows what debt, interest, and taxes are. Perhaps by using an encyclopedia, or Webster's.

Obligations suck.

Tim Allen correctly defined an obligation in the movie Jungle 2 Jungle as being, "It means something you really don't want to do, but you have to anyway." Not fulfilling your obligations, means punishment of some sort awaits you on the other end. So you drag yourself out of bed half-asleep to go pull overtime, to pay the bank interest, on the thing that's too expensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbxUSsFXYo4

Nothing's changed since Dolly Parton sang this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caBzvF9hwkI

Or for The Orville fans.

There's nothing more awe inspiring to me than a person who went to bankruptcy court already on a bankruptcy-inducing car fleece and a bunch of debt cards, and they're out of bankruptcy with a $500 limit Fingerhut card wondering how they can finance a camper and a bass boat.

The only person you cheat for sure when you take on debt is yourself, and the people in your household who will have to suffer because of your fool's errand.

Getting out of a bankruptcy and repeating the same poor behaviors (credit card binge spending, financing expensive cars, etc.) that led there is tragically common. People don't learn anything except that they got away with it last time and certainly there "must be some way to work the system" again. Watching these people re-emerge from bankruptcy is like watching a person get out of rehab and he's drinking again while he tells you they cured him.

Re: How much does age matter

SouthJamaica — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 21:47:33 GMT

@MeCasa wrote:
I've had a battle plan where I have been paying down debt and palnning to borrow unsecured $50,000. My score is up to 773 but now I'm starting to think they may not lend me money because of my age, I'm 70. I know there is no set answer but ya'll know more about this so your opinions mtter to me.

They're not even allowed to take that into account.

And they wouldn't, anyway.

Re: How much does age matter

MeCasa — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 22:00:53 GMT

To be truthfull, I quit turning in income tax a few years back. I kept my credit up and I was able to borrow from Lightstream on two different occasions to the tune of $20,000 each time and even managed to borrow and acumlative $40,000 unsecured. My credit is even higher now and I just assumed I could keep on doing it. But you are probably right and I was just lucky combined with a good payment history.

I'm sitting on a paid for million dollar house but I need another $100,00 to finish it. It's not worth anything till it's finished

Re: How much does age matter

IsambardPrince — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 01:41:19 GMT

@MeCasa wrote:

To be truthfull, I quit turning in income tax a few years back. I kept my credit up and I was able to borrow from Lightstream on two different occasions to the tune of $20,000 each time and even managed to borrow and acumlative $40,000 unsecured. My credit is even higher now and I just assumed I could keep on doing it. But you are probably right and I was just lucky combined with a good payment history.

I'm sitting on a paid for million dollar house but I need another $100,00 to finish it. It's not worth anything till it's finished

I don't know what it is with people and the "let it all fall down" attitude most of them have about their financial life.

There's also some of them out there that are so tight with money they're sleeping on the mattress they bought after coming home from Korea and they think if they have more money they can bribe their way into Heaven or something, I don't know.

Re: How much does age matter

MeCasa — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:45:03 GMT

I don't understand where you got don't care. I worked my whole life building a beautiful home FOR the kids.....I just ran out of money before it was finished....and I'm still trying to finish it