Book Evan

The framework

What’s your life credit score?

FICO reduced financial trustworthiness to a number a person can hold in their head. Nobody ever did that for the rest of a life. This is the version that does, and it is the argument behind the keynote.

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Eighteen questionsFour minutesSix factorsA report by emailFree

The argument

FICO is easy to dunk on. It is reductive, it is opaque, and it makes decisions about people it has never met. And still, it works. Three digits, and a stranger can make a decision about your reliability in seconds. That is an extraordinary piece of design, aimed at one narrow part of a life.

So I took the model and pointed it at the rest. Not to score people. To give them the same legibility about how they are living that a lender already has about how they borrow.

FICO uses five factors. I use six. I split collections out on its own, because in life it deserves a conversation the model never gave it.

The six factors

Borrowed math. Different subject.

Ordered by what FICO actually weights, heaviest first. The percentages are theirs. The second half of each line is mine.

The six factors

Weight ordered · FICO weighting

  1. Payment history.

    In credit, did you pay when you said you would. In life, when you said you would show up, did you show up?

    35% of FICO

  2. Utilization.

    In credit, what share of your limit is in use. Stay under thirty. In life, energy, attention, bandwidth. At ninety-five percent there is nothing left for what matters.

    30% of FICO

  3. Age of accounts.

    In credit, time is rewarded and there is no shortcut. In life, consistency, not intensity. How long have people been able to trust you?

    15% of FICO

  4. Inquiries.

    In credit, stack applications and you look desperate. In life, giver or taker. When did you last give something nobody asked you for?

    10% of FICO

  5. Credit mix.

    In credit, range across account types. In life, partner, parent, friend, coworker. Maxing one account while defaulting on the rest.

    10% of FICO

  6. Collections.

    In credit, the worst mark on the report. Seven years, and recoverable. In life, not the end of your story. But you do not fix it by pretending it is not there.

    In collections

Collections has no FICO weight of its own. Inside the model it lives in payment history. I pulled it out because the thing a person is still carrying rarely gets discussed as a line item, and it should be.

And then the acronym

FICO already spelled out what it takes.

Four letters everyone has seen on a mortgage document and nobody has read as a sentence.

Faith.

Something to hold when the evidence has not arrived yet.

Integrity.

Keeping the word you gave when nobody is checking.

Character.

What is left of you after the season you would rather not discuss.

Optimism.

The belief that a report can be rebuilt, because mine was.

Find your number

A score is not a verdict. It is a mirror.

Eighteen questions and four minutes gets you a number and a report that explains it factor by factor. The number is the least interesting part. What you decide to do with the one weak account is the whole point.

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Opens at thelifecreditscore.com