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?