Why You Can't Take It With You

We may think a reputation of honesty, integrity and respectability is what defines us. Not a bit of it. What really nails us to our mast is our credit rating score. These days, people, aka consumers, can't consume a single material morsel without this all-important reference. And, virtually every consumption you've made, and how you made it, affects the score that is used to judge you by.

What makes this state of affairs perhaps particularly galling is knowing that this vital rating is not notched up by anyone who actually knows us. The individual who has calculated mine and yours, and made it available for third party consumption, has neither met nor dealt with us on any personal basis. It's all done on hearsay - a kind of creditors' game of Chinese Whispers played by the people who stand behind all your financial requests, pleas, bargainings, payments, and, let's not overlook any non-payments you might have slipped up on even when you may have had a perfectly legitimate reason to do so. Yes, all those creditors have been busy giving a nod and a wink to the scorers every time they've been crossed by someone who has forgotten to pay or who held back a payment due to a query or complaint.

So what do we think of our scores? How would we rate ourselves? I surmise that most of us would mark this up as ten out of ten - after all, if we pay our bills on time and move through our adult lives paying off credit cards in a compliant fashion, why shouldn't it be? If anyone has a nagging feeling that their score card is less than perfect and that might be the reason for a hold-up in being granted credit when requested, then it's a good idea to check yours now through one of the many UK-based credit rating agencies.

Such referencing informing others whether an individual is credit worthy and passing judgement on a customer's character when it comes to financial sense and sensibility used to be the task of our bank manager - this was back in the good old days when the manager really did know their customers.

Now all of this rating and referencing is handled by people you've never met nor are likely to meet and if you did meet them socially your spending/saving/borrowing habits will never be discussed. The credit rating scores are arrived at electronically and it all comes down to a method of number crunching - pure and simple.

This is the system now used by those who control our finances - banks, lenders, and other financial institutions. And just how much harder the whole business is when you expatriate yourself from the shores of the UK. On arrival in a new country, expats are expected to tap into credit lines that will ensure they have a roof over their heads, equip their houses with heat, lighting and furnishings, transport themselves between locations, and obtain handy slithers of plastic to withdraw cash, buy food and other necessary items to live.

The particular problems expats are meeting these days include finding themselves totally out of the local credit extension loop. Because they are newcomers, no-one knows them or their financial history. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is whereas you can pack and take with you virtually every material asset, your credit rating doesn't export that easily. Your score is meaningless in a new country because its system for rating credit worthiness doesn't operate along similar lines to that managed back in the home country.

ExpatMoneyChannel doesn't consider this state of affairs to be fair. So we call on the UK-based credit rating agencies to evolve a system of universal referencing so that British expats can travel overseas with a meaningful credit score readily understood by foreign creditors, financiers and lenders. Such assistance will be the only way expats can take their worth with them.