mad anthony

Rants, politics, and thoughts on politics, technology, life,
and stuff from a generally politically conservative Baltimoron.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Is asking for credit scores on dates really a thing?

I've seen This NYT story claiming dates are now asking each other for their credit score posted on a few online dating blogs, like HowaboutWe's Date Report. But when you read the story and actually do some thinking, you realize it's pretty much not a thing.

Sure, there's one anecdotal story in the lede, but the rest of it is super-thin. There are few stories about people in actual relationships where one of them having bad credit caused problems, which is about as much news as the fact that the Pope is believed to be Catholic, and has a cool hat. My favorite "example", though, is that they site the existence of a site called CreditScoreDating as an example - a dating site where dates post their credit score. Except that if you go to it, it looks like something someone crapped out in 10 minutes. Also, it's news page contains an entry from 2009 stating that the site is for sale, which was the top entry until recently when the NYTimes article got reposted on the pages news site. I'm guessing someone crapped out a dating site years ago, and some lazy NYTimes reporter googled credit score dating and found it. Which still doesn't make it a thing.

The silly thing about this is that daters have been gathering financial information about dates for years, but even a complete dating klutz like myself doesn't do it by asking for FICO scores. Instead, they ask their date what they do for a living or what kind of car they drive or if they own or rent or other questions that would at least give you some idea of their financial situation is - yes, I realize you can have a high income and a lousy score, but you can generally get an idea if someone is living within their means.

And speaking of online dating, I've started collecting some of the worst/oddest profiles I've found online on another blog I've started, Plenty Of Fail (a play on Plenty of Fish, a large free online dating site).