What if your FB friends credit was part of judging your credit worthiness?

Your BFF's a slacker...No House For You

So I was up late browsing CNN.com because I wanted to get caught up on this so called Miley Cyrus debacle just to see what all the hype was about. After I read a couple articles and saw that the hype really wasn't that deep, my peripheral vision caught glimpse of a title to the left of the page, "Your Facebook friends could hurt your credit." Whooooaaaaa back up! This could be a man down code 10 affair!!!

As I clicked on the article I was thinking of how I was going to convey via Facebook stat to the 800+ people on my friend's list that they need inbox me their credit scores or not survive my wave of mass deletions in a quick effort to protect my credit worthiness because well, "my network equals my net worth" right? Surely, my followers who love my quirky, eccentric, sometimes controversial and thought provoking stats would not mistake my moves to protect my FICO score as pure arrogance. At least I hoped not.........Then I got a grip.

I could take a deep breath and release it. Or could I? Big lenders are still using the old FICO and Facebook ain't droppin' that score just yet. I hope they never use something as instable as social media connections to determine whether or not someone can pay their mortgage. But according to the article, "...some financial lending companies have found that social connections can be a good indicator of a person's credit worthiness." In other words, if they see you're friend doesn't pay their bills, chances are you won't either.

We have become use to employers using social media to research job applicants but now creditors are using your associations to determine whether you will pay your bills or not? Not only do I think this practice is far fetched and a waste of company time and money, I think it's quite the invasion of privacy as well. One company mentioned in the article goes as far as to determine if you're friends with one of their deliquent account holders in determining your creditworthiness. Oh Yikes!

I get the creeps when I think of how my online activity is being used. Those little cookies stored on my computer and those little spies these companies have in order to target their marketing and now this. I am hoping lenders never use this tactic in their determination of whether or not to approve homebuyers of mortgages. Something tells me that they may find a way to do so in the future. I have hear a few claims in the past from people who said they were in the process of getting a mortgage or going through loan modifications and saw that their lenders had ironically visited their profiles on LinkedIn. Nothing ever came of them but I hope social media interactions never have a say in the direction the real estate market is going. That would not be a pretty picture.

Selling? Buying? You should call me for that. Dee Neal Palmer House Properties 678.387.9309