[hectormalot]

> Simply because the credit system is _in my opinion_ imperfect and punishes people harshly. It encourages borrowing. i.e. if a person is responsible and chooses not to open a credit line, then their credit is considered bad, and banks would consider them risky. That's just one example.

That's a US (and maybe some other countries as well) perspective, but not the same for all countries. e.g. in The Netherlands, your credit report is mostly concerned about how much debt you have (vs capacity to pay) and if you have debts in arrears. I understood historic debt payments don't really factor into it here.

Note that different debts do have different weights. e.g. a car loan for 20k can reduce the limit of your max mortgage by 50k because its a bigger impact on your capacity to pay.

[judge2020]

In general that's how it works here too, people just like to watch their VantageScore rise and fall when most non-credit card credit decisions only worry about debt. The only thing that really matters is any history of late payments, but I imagine lenders in the Netherlands also wouldn't like it if you had multiple late payments to lenders every year.