I am not my FICO score

When I started buying real estate in 2003, I developed an unusual compulsion. I was a FICOmaniac. I joined one of those services that keeps track of your credit scores from the three major bureaus, and checked it nearly daily. I charted the ups and downs like a stock broker, kept spreadsheets, and analyzed every tick. Yes, not unlike today’s fascination with Facebook, I was addicted to FICOisGod.com and happily paid $6.95 a month for the privilege.

Here’s why: “They” had me convinced that those services held my hopes in their cold little computerized hands. If just one of the bureaus recorded the tiniest error, which they do with ridiculous regularity, it could lose me my dream home or get me a non-competitive rate that could cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the long-haul (and I do mean competitive. “What rate did you get? Really? I got an eighteenth percent less. Too bad for you.”) For a time, they had me convinced that my credit score was the single most important number in my life, that it revealed my value as a human being… because I believed that home ownership was the single most important success measure any of us could aspire to.

Then in September 2008, a dream-killing hurricane roared ashore in Galveston, where I lived, followed in short order by Lehman Bros. filing Chapter whatever and the subsequent market collapse, and those events changed everything for me and millions of others just like me — literally and figuratively — overnight.

The power company wanted me to pay for electricity when my meter was under water. The satellite company wanted me to pay for TV when there was no dish. The water company wanted my to pay for service when there wasn’t any. The HOA wanted me to pay for building deductibles past, present, and future. And don’t even get me started about the insurance companies. The list was bottomless and just taking their calls became a full-time job. (“Hello, this is Alice. Did you hear we had a 100-year hurricane? And just because it’s off your radar out in Podunk, Nowheresville, or worse, Bangalore, doesn’t mean it isn’t still front and center on mine. Report me to the credit bureaus? Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Thanks so much for calling.”)

Finally, the same folks who were so eager to lend me mortgage money when my credit was good were less inclined to work with me through “the shift.” They preferred to resell my home for thirty cents on the dollar than extend my payments by 90 days or restructure my loan. Suddenly my FICO score was in the toilet through absolutely no fault of my own, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Thousands of people in Tuscaloosa and Joplin and up the East Coast are about to learn this lesson first-hand, too. They never imagined it, I’m sure. Nobody does. So I shouldn’t have been surprised this week when one of my Facebook friends’ friend made a snide remark about drug testing for welfare recipients in Florida. I suggested that requiring drug testing for Federal assistance could be a slippery slope — FEMA is a Federal agency, and every single one of us who has gone through a natural disaster lately has benefitted in some way, be it a FEMA hotel room or a trailer or financial assistance or tree removal or even the MREs (Army food pouches) they pass out in parking lots after an event. Her response was flip and not a little condescending, “Well, I guess if you’re planning to take assistance,” implying that she never would. Poor naive soul.

So what does a person do about a cratered self-worth when it’s snatched away by Mother Earth and Uncle Wall Street?

I quickly made peace with the fact that I am not my FICO score. Whatever those data records say about me at any snapshot moment in time in no way defines me and certainly will have no bearing on how people remember me when I’m gone.

I discovered the joy of renting. I get to live in beautiful places for a set amount of money every month, and I don’t have to worry about maintenance, repairs, taxes, or insurance. My home is where I cook and grow my flowers and entertain friends and raise my pets and share love, and those things don’t change no matter whose name is on the deed. I may or may not ever buy again, but I know one thing for sure: We need to stop telling people that their self-worth depends on their ability to buy a house. It can be a lovely thing, but it ain’t for everyone.

That’s all sacrilege, I know, given I’m a licensed real estate broker, but here are two lessons I wish everyone could grok just because I say they’re true:  First, unforeseen and unprovoked disaster can befall you without warning and change your life in ways you never considered possible, so don’t be arrogant. Second, owning one’s own home doesn’t make you a better person and is not required to live a productive, satisfying, happy life.

Pass it on.