I always assumed credit scores were an integral and historic part of the American financial system.
They were not, they are very recent，most of your parents didn’t have credit scores growing up, and as you can probably tell or at least intuit, it’s mostly just a b******* scheme for those with capital to accrue more capital by invading your privacy.
That isn’t public.
It requires trust to believe that they are telling the truth about what impacts the score in a positive or negative way.
Plus they say it in the most vague way so people can’t ‘game the system’ which is not an issue if the system is fair because ‘gaming the system’ is doing the thing they want you to do. Sometimes it looks like the things they say are accurate, but other times they appear to have the opposite effect because of some interaction they aren’t telling us. Like the fact that paying off a loan too early reduces your credit score even though having fewer debts is supposed to increase it.
They are pretty precise on what to do in order to game the system.
Get credit cards that you pay off every month. Keep your first free credit cards as long as possible to boost your account age. Keep you credit card account balance as low as possible. Take out as many 0% interest loans as you can.
Total debt has never been a function of the score.