What does it take to get a 0 credit score
I'm not sure if a 0 credit score is the same thing as having 'no credit history'. I'm wondering how long it would take a credit score to drop to 0 (something Dave Ramsey says happens eventually after you pay off all of your debt/close all accounts). I looked online and people seem to suggest that there is no such thing as a 0 credit score and that it will take between 10 years and never for your credit history to go away. I think I've heard Dave Ramsey say it takes between 6 months and a year but I can't seem to find anything to verify this. Does anyone know how long it would take for your credit score to drop to 0? Or if there is such a thing for that matter as a 0 credit score?
Thanks.
Additional info:
My goal is a 0 credit score, and I would see that just as a small personal accomplishment. All of my debt/accounts are now paid off and closed so I just want to know if this is something that will happen and if so approximately when. This question is entirely driven by personal curiosity.
This is the form I saw where people said there is no such thing as a 0 credit score: www.city-data.com/forum/personal-finance/1139747-how-long-does-take-credit-score.html
Final thoughts:
I selected the 'correct' answer because its seemed to be the most popular. Some answers contradicted each other. At the very least it sounds like a 0 credit score used to be possible, if it is now I still don't know. Based on those answers it sounds like after 10 years the best I can get is insufficient credit history. And like I said this was more out of personal curiosity the last account I had open was a mortgage, and now that is closed I shouldn't ever have another reason to borrow money again.
(6)6 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
It is possible, it happened to me
I don't know when it was reset, but I moved out of the US in 2005 and was living abroad for 11 years. When I returned to the US to resettle in 2016, a week after I arrived I went to a dealership to lease a car. When the salesman ran my credit he said it came back as zero, and he'd never seen that before. My stepfather cosigned the lease.
While away I had no credit and no loans or debts. So it went down to zero at some point, but I'm not sure when. After about a year of structured planning for credit, I was back up to about 700. I was able to get a mortgage earlier this year, with my own credit.
To clarify part of your question, the range for FICO scores is 300-850, so to start with, there is no such thing as a "zero" credit score.
To answer the rest, a lack of credit history will not put you at the low end of the scale. You would need to have a long history of bankruptcy, missed payments, judgments, etc., to approach the 300 end of the scale. If you have no credit history at all, you will be in the "fair" credit range which will not get you the best available rates on loans, but it will not be impossible to obtain credit at higher rates.
Dave Ramsey is only telling part of the truth about your score declining if you close all of your accounts. Yes, your scores will decline immediately as your oldest open accounts are closed and the average age of your open credit lines will effectively become 0. The age of current credit lines is only a small portion of the score. Payments (on time and late) are in your history for 7 years, but that doesn't mean your credit history is completely clean even after 7 years. Even if you closed all accounts and waited for everything to age out of your credit report, you would still be back to possibly high 500s with your score immediately improving as soon as you started creating a good payment history again.
The Dave Ramsey 6 months to a year is not correct. Bad credit stay on for 7 years, but an account in good standing when closed will show for 10 years. When I check my own credit report, I see pages of accounts long closed.
I am curious how you'd plan to rent a car or reserve a hotel room. These are the 2 things that come to mind which are pretty annoying to do without a credit card.
Edit - I added a link to back up my 10 year claim. And I shake my head at the downvote with no comment. Even though I was not critical of The David.
I had a zero credit score when completing the purchase of my house in the USA, in 2006. They key seems to be only having lived there 9 months and had no US debt or utility bills as they were included in the rent. Several people expressed surprise that the credit union would lend to us with a 0 credit score.
The thing about credit scores that many people do not understand is that the standards change. What was true a few years ago, certainly is not true today and could be vastly different in a few weeks.
There is no such thing as a 0 credit score, only that you could have insufficient history to provide a score. People in certain disciplines see a big difference in a value such as zero, and "cannot be calculated". Saying that a score is zero is careless wording.
However, in the future, very few adults will have the ability to have no score. FICO intends to use utility payments to determine a score even if you don't have open credit accounts. See the article New FICO Score Factors in Utilities & How Often You Move
In my opinion it is just as foolish to attempt to achieve a no-score as it is to achieve an 825 or above. A credit score does not represent wealth or what kind of person you are. Let it go, set goals where you can achieve the outcome, and take care of your loved ones. Credit score is something you cannot directly
control.
The ambiguous term, “zero credit score,” is causing confusion here.
The sources telling you it’s impossible to achieve mean a FICO score of zero. Some of the answers interpret it to mean the worst possible FICO score. Wrecking your finances to get one of those would be a terrible idea. If you really want to borrow a large amount of money and not pay it back, do what the pros do and start a limited-liability company.
What Dave Ramsey means is a blank credit report. (I do not personally agree that this is good advice for most people, but that’s another question.) By law, the credit bureaus can only keep events on your credit report for a certain number of years. This is also what the car salespeople who told other posters that they had a credit score of zero meant: the customers had been living in another country or had never had an account under their own names, so they had no reportable credit history at all. Lenders would treat them very differently than someone who came in with a long history of taking out big personal loans and defaulting!
You might confuse people less if you talked about “a clean slate” or “a blank credit report.”
Terms of Use Privacy policy Contact About Cancellation policy © freshhoot.com2025 All Rights reserved.