Ha, what up Landis. This is good stuff. I can definetely agree about the stress of owing money and think you make good points, especially from a nonfinancial perspective. My concern is that I think you may be kidding yourself how easy it would be to find a mortgage without a FICO score. I haven't really done any research on the subject so I am not going to claim to know, but I can tell you that any of the traditional lending routes are going to want to see a FICO score. Also, I would like to take back my earlier comment about getting a credit card teaches you financial responsibility. You can get that same effect out of a debit card or cash, bottom line is pay your bills each month (no matter how you do it). As for the stress, in my opinion, it is easier to pay off one credit card bill each month instead of five seperate smaller bills. Any expense that I can set-up auto pay for goes to my credit card. At the end of the month I pay my credit card. One bill to replace numerous others.
There are other options to building credit without a credit card. Loans work great. I once knew someone who had an awesome credit score BECAUSE they totalled like two or three cars. There were loans on the cars, covered by gap insurance for any outstanding loan amount. When the car was totalled insurance pays off the loan. Boom, you just had a good size loan outstanding that was paid in full. However, I wouldn't go buy a car and wreck it just to build credit, ha. Just an illustrative example.
Then there is the other consideration of not buying into credit as a way of sticking it to the man (for lack of better words). This is a pretty deep and complex topic and I am not gonna act like I have a strong opinion one way or the other. Banks can suck, yes, but banks are also absolutely imperative to our society functioning how it does (for better or worse). The world is build on credit. From a business perspective it would be nearly impossible to grow without being able to leverage financial resources. Whether business growing the way they do is good or bad is another debate and is why I am not going to claim a strong opinion either way. I am all for small business but there are also some big businesses that can't be done on a small scale. Anyways, that is getting off topic of credit scores.
My main point is don't wait until you need a FICO score to start building credit. Having a fraction of a percent off a mortgage interest rate will save you thousands of dollars down the road. I never really fully understood just how much interest you pay on a large loan until I was in intermediate accounting and had to make ammortization tables. On a 30 year mortgage you can end up paying nearly as much on interest as you do on principal, during the beginning loan payments you can be paying 75% interest and 25% principal. Same is true with any large loan. A 15-year obviously saves a bunch of money on interest, but you have to consider how long it will take you to save up and make enough for a 15-year. What I think is better advice is to get a 30-year mortgage and pay it off like it is a 15. If you do this you have to be sure there isn't any minimum mortgage interest or some BS in your loan that says no matter what you'll pay this much money. But if you do a 30-year and treat it like a 15-year you have the security of making smaller payments if you come across hard times. Getting yourself committed to high monthly payments can be dangerous.
I could go on and on so I'll just stop.
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TL
R - don't wait until you need a credit score to decide you should start building credit.
