This is what people are missing. Credit score is a completely valid metric, but it's just a measure of how likely lenders are to make money off of you.

That’s how I’ve tried to be (and currently have no debt!).

When I needed to buy a car a few years ago, they gave me a terrible rate because I had a bad score. I had paid off a couple of personal loans AND all my student loans…but it’d been a few years so my credit score had dropped. So fuck me for not borrowing money every day.

I ended up doing a co-sign for a better rate. And guess what? I paid off that car loan a couple years early and got dinged on my credit just like the original post.

But I know they don’t care about any of that and are actually mad I didn’t pay the minimum for the entirety of the loan.

If I would loan money to people, I want them to pay me back as soon as they can. But if I wanted to make money with loans, I'd want my customers to pay their loans as slowly as possible to put a lot of interest rates in my pocket.

Maybe you could just keep refinancing over and over until you're making 0.01 payments a month on 100 loans. And have a max credit score.

The terms of a loan boil down to "we'll give you x, pay it back plus interest in y amount of time". How do you stretch something with a legally binding predetermined end out indefinitely without hurting your score or financial wellbeing?

I think the point here though isn’t as much ‘how do we play the game?’ as it is why there hell are we all forced into playing a metagame that is so inherently harmful and specifically designed to encourage risky behavior (I.e. the idea of debt being favorable)?

Yep, find credit cards with no monthly fee and open them. I have 3 lines of credit and only use the one with the highest benefits. I pay off the bill after it hits my statement, and my credit is always 780-790. Also, like you said, up your limit if you can to get a lower debt to available credit ratio.

Edit: I bet the people down voting me have terrible credit lol.

You can use the cards, just don't carry a balance. If you don't use a card ever, it's likely going to get cancelled.

The easy thing you can do is set recurring bills only to a credit card and then set that card to auto pay the entire balance each month. Something like Netflix or even your electricity bill.

Put the bill on the card, and if you don't have the willpower to shove the card in the back of a drawer and never use it, cut it up. The card doesn't go inactive, you don't rack up debt or interest, and you can maintain a high credit to debt ratio.

Reasons.